Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It 2021006986, 2021006987, 9780367722159, 9780367720568, 9781003153917

Citation preview

LABOUR’S ANTISEMITISM CRISIS

Between 2015 and 2020 the Labour Party was riven by allegations that the party had tolerated antisemitism. For the Labour right, and some in the media, the fact that such allegations could be made was proof of a moral collapse under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Sections of the left, meanwhile, sought to resist the accusations by claiming that the numbers of people accused of racism were few, that the allegations were an orchestrated attack, and that those found guilty were excluded from the party. This important book by one of Britain’s leading historians of anti-​fascism gives a more detailed account than any yet published of what went wrong in Labour. Renton rejects those on the right who sought to exploit the issue for factional advantage. He also criticises those of his comrades on the left who were ignorant about what most British Jews think and demonstrated a willingness to antagonise them. This book will appeal to anyone who cares about antisemitism or left-​wing politics. David Renton is a British historian and barrister. His other books include No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History, Law and Politics (Routledge 2021) and Never Again: Rock against Racism and the Anti-​Nazi League 1976–​1982 (Routledge 2019).

LABOUR’S ANTISEMITISM CRISIS What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It

David Renton

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©2022 David Renton The right of David Renton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Renton, Dave, 1972– author. Title: Labour’s antisemitism crisis: what the left got wrong and how to learn from it / David Renton. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021006986 (print) | LCCN 2021006987 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367722159 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367720568 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003153917 (ebook) Classification: LCC JN1129.L32 R46 2022 (print) | LCC JN1129.L32 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/4041–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006986 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/202100698 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​72215-​9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​72056-​8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​15391-​7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

Preface  1 Introduction 

vii 1

2 The uniqueness of antisemitism 

15

3 Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine 

32

4 Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism 

51

5 Jews and the slave trade 

63

6 Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right 

77

7 Seeing no evil: Corbyn and the Mear One mural 

90

8 Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew 

103

9 The Labour left and the Israel lobby 

111

10 The Labour right and anti-​Zionist Jews 

121

11 The bullying of Luciana Berger 

132

12 Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews 

141

vi Contents

13 From the edge of the anti-​war movement 

156

14 Israel’s Eastern European allies 

170

15 On gatekeeping 

181

16 Antisemitism and black emancipation 

202

17 Conclusion 

211

Index 

218

PREFACE

I began writing this book in summer 2020. The report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into antisemitism within the Labour Party was expected imminently.1 Mike Phipps, the editor of the website Labour Hub, invited me to write a piece addressing whether the conclusions of the EHRC report were justified and whether there was any evidence that the commission had failed to consider. Of the two questions Mike had posed me, the second would be harder to answer. I thought I knew what he meant by “other evidence”; Labour officials associated with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership had recently completed a document on the handling of the party’s antisemitism crisis which had exculpated him from responsibility leadership.2 But the set of possible absences from the report had to be wider than that. I rejected the instinct of many Corbyn supporters to assume the worst of the Commission. Accordingly, I decided to remind myself of the key events of the crisis, both the episodes of which the Labour left spoke often and the ones that we tried our hardest to ignore. I drew up a one-​page chronology. That document went through a second draft and a third. No matter how much I added, I found that there were extra depths to the story which I had not yet measured. My short chronology became an essay, and still there was more to think about. The narrative grew, until it became this book. I had been asked to write the piece as a lawyer which brings us to one of the themes of the crisis. Many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn’s former leadership were determined to see Labour’s main problem as one of “process”; in other words, if only complaints had been investigated more quickly and more thoroughly, the scale of the problem would have become clearer and it would have been apparent to anyone watching that in fact only a tiny minority of members of the Labour Party had said anything offensive. On the right, there was a similar fixation on procedure, except that the narrative promoted by the critics of Corbyn’s leadership insisted that he and his allies had been slow to address the problem and over-​concerned

viii Preface

with protecting other leftists. They had the significant advantage of having a much simpler story to tell. Corbyn was incapable of addressing the problem, the Labour right said, because of his opposition to Israel. As the remainder of this book sets out, I find each of these narratives unconvincing. The left’s account tends to minimise the problem of anti-​Jewish racism inside Labour while the right ignores the problem outside. The rest of this book shows how those mistakes arise. In this Preface, I ask readers to note only the way in which the question, “Have members of the Labour Party said hurtful things about Jews?” changed into, “Does the Labour Party have adequate structures to investigate whether members have been antisemitic?” Both sides, it seemed, wanted there to be a legal answer to what was at its heart a political dispute. When the editor of Labour Hub approached me, I imagine he was looking for a Corbyn-​friendly lawyer to write something reflective. I was suggested to him as  a member of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers who has spent more than a decade representing workers and tenants in discrimination claims.3 But my legal experience is not all that I bring to this subject. I also have a longer history on the left. I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party from 1991 to 2003 and from 2008 to 2013, before leaving over that party’s rape scandal.4 In 2015 and 2017, I was also a registered supporter but not a full member of the Labour Party. Through my mother, I am descended from Jewish Holocaust survivors who lived in central Europe until 1939, then in Melbourne, and later in London. I have written about that heritage in Jewish Socialist5 (many of whose regular contributors later joined the pro-​Corbyn group, Jewish Voice for Labour [JVL]). Further, over the past 20 years I have written numerous books about fascism and anti-​f ascism. Fitting this legacy together, some readers may be hoping that the narrative which follows takes sides, excoriating Corbyn’s critics in every instance and giving the Labour left a clean bill of health. Anyone hoping for that that will be disappointed. You also need to know that the past four years I have been arguing with anyone who will listen that the left has tolerated antisemitism, or at least a mindset which comes close to antisemitism –​an ignorance about what most British Jews think combined with an indifference to the prospect of antagonising them. I have seen that attitude when an acquaintance with a 40-​year history of activism in left-​wing Jewish and anti-​Zionist circles, sought to explain to me that British Jews were a privileged white community and therefore by definition the left would waste any time it spent seeking any kind of dialogue with them. I have seen it when friends I have known for years, and who are finely attuned to other forms of discrimination, shared defences of antisemitic images which were themselves cut and pasted from David Icke’s website. I have also encountered it in the refusal of other friends to accept that any of the incidents described in this book crossed any sort of line. On the left, we too often accepted the excuse given by people who were treating Jewish people with ignorance and contempt that they did so as part of a project

Preface  ix

to challenge Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I do not agree that Labour’s difficulties were caused by a surfeit of enthusiasm for Palestinian rights. This cannot be used as an excuse by people who called Jewish Labour MPs traitors, or who shared fantasies to the effect that Jews were a secret cabal of the super-​r ich, responsible for all the great crimes of history including the Holocaust. That said, in another perspective, the argument here was an echo of battles being fought elsewhere. In the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, I want to see peace which permits both groups to live in a state of equality. One of the tragedies of Labour’s antisemitism crisis was that for all the rhetorical support given to Palestinians, desperately few attempts were made to explain what is at stake in that conflict. It is precisely because I am committed to peace which removes Israel’s racial laws and reconstitutes that state on a new basis that I reject any supposed defence of the Palestinians which expresses itself in antisemitic terms. I need to explain also how I understand the left, by which I mean the whole Labour Party as well as all the groups to its left, social movements, trade unions, tenants union, and anyone whose politics correspond to any of these groups. Because I am a part of the left, I feel a responsibility for the whole. If one group should acquiesce in rape, violence, or racial harassment, everyone else is diminished, irrespective of which tribe has our loyalty. It is never good enough to say, “Those people over there, they made a mistake. My groups of socialists were immune”. If they were at fault, then so were you –​by failing to speak out and stop them. There are many passages in this book where I criticise the right, the centre right, the leaders of mainstream Jewish institutions and the press. Later chapters will explain, for example, why the demand for expulsions rather than explanation (“zero tolerance”) is misplaced. In so arguing, this account is at odds with the majority of Jewish and media narratives of the crisis. But the focus of this book is ultimately on what the left got wrong, since that is easier for me to address. I am part of the left and expect a fair listening from people who share certain values with me. Many thanks to the friends who have commented on drafts of this manuscript, including Philip Alexander, Daphna Baram, Bill Bowring, Liz Davies, Joseph Finlay, Craig Fowlie, Joel Hames, Richard Kuper, Brendan McGeever, Michal Nahman, Simon Pirani, and Dan Trilling. I am grateful to the people with whom I have discussed these issues online and who have commented (a group well into the thousands), including friends who have disagreed with me or who suggested reading which otherwise I would have missed. I thank the editors of All That Is Solid, Labour Hub, Novara, and Tempest for allowing me to use material first published by them. This book was largely written before the publication of the EHRC’s report. It was later edited and redrafted to reflect the report’s publication. I have tried to state my understanding of the facts as accurately as I could as of 31 December 2020. I have resisted the temptation to comment on subsequent events even where those appear optimistic or indeed echo the analysis of this book.

newgenprepdf

x Preface

Notes 1 Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party (London: Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2020). 2 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014–​2019,’ Labour Party, March 2020. 3 D. Renton, Struck Out: Why Employment Tribunals Fail Workers and What Can Be Done (London: Pluto, 2012); D. Renton, Jobs and House: Stories of the Law in the Lockdown (London: Legal Action, 2021). 4 E. Platt, ‘Comrades at War,’ New Statesman, 16 May 2014. 5 D. Renton, ‘What Makes a Jewish Socialist?’ Jewish Socialist, spring 2003.

1 INTRODUCTION

There is a conventional way for left-​wing authors to write about antisemitism.1 We assume that antisemitism is essentially the same as it was in 1920: that it employs the same rhetorical devices, and that it is used by much the same people. We argue that far-​r ight opinions should be treated as objectionable because they have repeatedly invoked antisemitic myths and because they have encouraged antisemitic violence. We think of antisemitism as something which exists on the political spectrum only at the furthest corners of the right: as far from us as it is possible to be.We treat antisemitism as an “old” phenomenon, essentially unchanged in all this time. Enough of that evasive we: this is how I have written about it, and in more than one book before now.2 Since 2016 that approach has shown itself to be plainly insufficient.Antisemitism3 has ceased to be the sole preserve of the far right; from the margins it has crept in towards the centre. Indeed, the left too has hardly been immune to it. In the United States, public discussion of antisemitism has largely focussed on the way in which antisemitism is no longer limited to the far right but has been used by mainstream conservatives. (This point is further developed in Chapter 6). In Britain, by contrast, there has been a different public debate about antisemitism. Our newspapers and TV stations have insisted that antisemitism is a new phenomenon, different from the racism of the past, and mainly associated with the left. The historical experience of fascism was that it operated as an ideological bulldozer, breaking down the walls which separated one form of politics from another. Several prominent fascists swapped sides politically, and some did so repeatedly. The first fascist, Benito Mussolini, was a Marxist, at times almost an anarchist, then a right-​wing gun for hire before he became a fascist.4 Sir Oswald Mosley was a Conservative and then a Labour MP before he founded the British Union of Fascists.5 For a few extraordinary weeks at the start of 1919, even Adolf Hitler –​on his own account, history’s most consistent one-​cause obsessive on behalf of the

2 Introduction

far right –​found himself temporarily supporting the Bavarian Soviet led by Kurt Eisner, a libertarian Socialist uprising for workers’ rights, and marching with a red armband at Eisner’s funeral.6 In circumstances of war, revolution, and counter-​revolution, Europeans lurched between left and right or between centre right and far right. One of the reasons they could switch like this was the widespread acceptance in 1920s and 1930s Europe of the conspiracy theory that behind every trend in politics could be discerned the hidden hand of a Jew. Plenty of people who at one point considered themselves shrewd conservatives or ardent socialists also shared these fantasies about Jewish control. Think back to the mighty trade unions of the immediate post-​ 1918 world whose strikes had motivated more than one self-​employed person to become a conservative, or the malevolent bosses who made others into socialists.7 Both workers and bosses could be reimagined as Jews (even if they had no Jewish ancestry at all), and in that way those reconciled to fascism could tell themselves that none of their previous ideas had changed. They had always been a nationalist or a socialist, and fascism was the continuation of those ideas under a new name. It might be that we are seeing something like the same process today, with antisemitism serving as one of several means by which the coalitions of left and right are broken apart and a new right-​wing politics emerges. But even that feels too simple. Rather, new issues have emerged, and these politics have sundered old alliances even while the same parties remain where they were, with the same prospects of achieving power, perhaps a single point ahead or behind where they were in the polls. For those who follow politics by the day or the hour, everything changes. In the cool gaze of public opinion, everything remains unendingly the same. The only way to respond with integrity to the rise of antisemitism is to treat it as an absolute wrong, and to see it as no less repugnant whether the person expressing antisemitic views is someone who you have previously agreed with, or someone to whom you have always objected. If the left has criticised the fascists of the 1930s or the 1990s because they repeatedly employed antisemitic language, we can only take the same approach of censure when we see people who are much closer to us have used antisemitic words or left them unchallenged. The complete rejection of antisemitism which this book calls for is depressingly rare in British politics, where the dominant approach has been to admit antisemitism only where it is found on the other side of politics. When Labour was accused of antisemitism, supporters of the far right such as Nigel Farage, Nick Griffin, or Tommy Robinson were delighted, and forced themselves into the story, either by denouncing Corbyn (Farage and Robinson) or claiming to support the Labour leader (Griffin). In either case, they wanted to show that public opposition to the far right had been misplaced. The real racists were to be found on the left.8 Among Conservatives, the same method has predominated. Antisemitism has been denounced, so long as the person responsible was a socialist. In March 2019, the prominent Brexiteer MP Jacob Rees-​Mogg retweeted a speech by Alice Weidel, the leader of the German far-​r ight party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), telling

Introduction  3

her followers: “The AfD leader asks: ‘Is it any wonder the British see bad faith behind every manoeuvre from Brussels?’ ”. In Germany, the AfD has been accused of playing down the crimes of the Nazi regime. The second AfD leader Alexander Gauland called the Nazi era “a bird shit” in German history, while a third Björn Höcke has called for a “reversal of Germany’s culture of remembrance”. After an attempted attack on a synagogue in October 2019, the AfD’s Stephan Brandner mocked those who had been “hanging around” the synagogue demonstrating their support.9 Indeed this was not the first time that Rees-​Mogg had been accused of helping antisemites. In 2013, he had been the guest of honour at a dinner of the Traditional Britain Group, a regular gathering of the British far right, whose guests have included Mark Collett, former youth leader of the British National Party.10 Two months after Rees-​Mogg, the Traditional Britain Group invited American fascist Richard Spencer to speak.11 Labour MPs criticised Rees-​Mogg for his tweet and for approving the AfD, but the only right-​wing paper to notice the controversy was the Times, which reported the story as a sign of the BBC’s “lefty obsession” with Rees-​Mogg.12 Seven months later, Rees-​Mogg claimed that Brexit was opposed by George Soros, calling him the “Remoaner funder-​in-​chief ”, linking his opponents in the Remain camp to the taint of Jewish domination. Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, a journalist who is cited several times in this book for the care he took to expose left-​wing antisemitism, ran to Rees-​Mogg’s defence. “It is not antisemitic to mention the name of a Jew”, he wrote.13 On the blog by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s special adviser Dominic Cummings, a theme was that the British people were being kept from enjoying the benefits of Brexit by a campaign run by the investment bank Goldman Sachs.Three times Cummings posted that Remain was funded by that bank. In November 2019, Cummings warned that in the coming elections Remain supporters “will cheat the rules, they will do anything, supported by the likes of Goldman Sachs writing the cheques like they did in 2016”.14 Now, it is true that Goldman Sachs did donate to the pro–​European Union (EU) campaign Britain Stronger in Europe, giving £500,000 or around three percent of the total funds raised by Remainers during the campaign.15 Yet Cummings has never complained about any of the other businesses and charities which raised the much larger 97 percent of Remain campaigners’ funds. Why then has he only ever singled out Goldman Sachs? It is not too hard to find the answer, that is, it is because Sachs was a bank founded by Jewish people and still widely seen as a Jewish business,16 while other major donors to the Remain cause, such as Tower Limited Partnership, the European Movement, or Scientists for the EU, do not carry the same taint. Moreover, who could he mean by speaking of the “likes of ” Goldman Sachs, except to imply that there were other unnamed Jewish bankers also covertly financing Remain? Dominic Cummings’ dog-​whistle antisemitism was noted in the Independent and City AM newspapers,17 but ignored by the Times, Telegraph, Sun, Daily Mail, and Express. In the run-​up to the 2019 general election three Conservative candidates were investigated for antisemitism. Sally-​Ann Hart the candidate for Hastings and Rye

4 Introduction

had shared a video in 2017 which suggested that the Jewish financier and focus of antisemitic hatred George Soros controlled the EU. She also liked a comment about him that read, “Ein Reich”. Lee Anderson, candidate for Ashfield, had been an active participant in the Ashfield Backs Boris Facebook group in which Soros conspiracy theories were repeatedly shared and whose other members included supporters of the far-​r ight activist Tommy Robinson. Meanwhile, Richard Short, the candidate for St Helens South and Whiston, had written that a Jewish journalist was more loyal to Israel than to Britain. While the likes of the Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle did express their concern about the politics of Hart and Anderson (each of whom has since been elected to Parliament), the story received minimal coverage in the right-​wing press.18 In 2019, a Conservative MP (and future Attorney General) Suella Braverman was criticised for using the term “Cultural Marxism”, a phrase popularised by the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, which updates the Nazi idea of “cultural Bolshevism”,19 and which these days explains the ills of society by relation to a group of post-​war Jewish and Marxist thinkers (the Frankfurt School) whose ideas supposedly permeate Hollywood and our shared imagination. It is one of the most common talking points of today’s antisemitic far right.20 The Board of Deputies pointed out the origins of her remarks and asked her not to repeat them. Save for a passing reference in the Daily Mail ten months later,21 the Conservative press ignored them. Her critics believed her when she said she had used the words innocently.22 This reflex Francis Beckett and Mark Seddon characterise as “an instinct to believe the best of the right, and the worst of the left”.23 Through the course of 2020, the same term was used ever more frequently by Conservatives. It was used by two Conservative MPs John Hayes and Tom Hunt in a debate in the House of Commons in October 2020.24 Twenty-​eight Conservative MPs and peers from the party’s “Common Sense” group used the same term in a letter to the Telegraph in November 2020.25 The Antisemitism Policy Trust brought out a report arguing that the report was antisemitic. Andrew Percy co-​chair of the All-​ Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) against Antisemitism told readers of the Jewish Chronicle that he had commissioned the document and sent it to Conservative MPs. He congratulated himself for taking this step, “A problem arose. I didn’t tweet about it, I acted”, and invited readers to take his action as a clear sign that prominent institutions were equally concerned about Conservative and Labour racism.That step would have been rather more impressive if the report had been less rushed. Parts of it were cribbed from Wikipedia. It made no mention of nor did it criticise the Conservatives who had used the phrase. It (and Percy) told readers that the phrase had long been used in academic circles: when no academic has ever used it in the way the far right does to explain the imagined cultural origins of a fantasy of white genocide. The report emphasised the potential to use the term innocently (saying that it “is often used without antisemitic intention”), before warning that “more often than not, [it] is now a code for Jewish plot”.26 If Conservative MPs read the report and grasped that it was meant as a warning to them, that rebuke was delivered with all the anger of a purring kitten.

Introduction  5

To turn now to Labour –​and the events which are the subject of this book –​ were they justified? Did Labour have a problem or was it all, as many left-​wing supporters of Corbyn insisted, a witch-​hunt, in which fears were magnified beyond any rational basis, and people who had a significant potential to contribute to the left were being driven out of politics? Between 15 June 2015 and 31 March 2019, the UK’s national press published around 5500 articles about antisemitism in the Labour Party;27 and for each such article there were many further pieces on private blogs or on other news sites. To pre-​empt one of the two main strands of argument that run through this book, the campaign could not have lasted had it not been for the reality that the press, and Labour supporters, were repeatedly able to find instances of behaviour which was either antisemitic or within the touching distance of it: •

•

•

•

• •

•

An attempt to counterattack criticism of antisemitism by invoking the historical crimes of Zionism, which was repetitive, blithe to any nuance in history, and uninterested in courting any significant strand of Jewish opinion except for those who had already decided in favour of Corbyn (this is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4); A willingness to accept the worst about Jewish people, and therefore to repeat untruths about the role played by Jews during the Atlantic slave trade (Chapter 5); A sides-​based rallying in support of an embattled Labour leader, in which people would share defences of Corbyn without applying to them even a minimal care –​an attitude seen most clearly in the controversy over the Mear One mural (Chapter 7); A tendency to imagine that anyone who supported Israel, or opposed antisemitism, must be part of a well-​resourced “lobby” funded by the Israeli government (Chapter 9); Quiescence as other members of the Labour left harassed his prominent Jewish critics, above all the Labour MP Luciana Berger (Chapter 11); The growth of a “shadow” anti-​war left, which combined anti-​war messages with support for dictatorships in the Global South, and antisemitic politics and was promoted on social media by at least one prominent Labour MP (Chapter 13); and A failure by a generation of older, often Jewish, left-​wingers who had previously been active in fighting antisemitism, but who relaxed their gatekeeping activities for fear of being seen to take sides against the most left-​wing leader of the Labour Party in a generation (Chapter 15).

Not all Corbyn’s supporters made these mistakes, but enough did to damage his cause. The press, the Labour right, and the Conservatives could not have successfully made a story out of the antisemitism crisis had it not been for the experience of Jews and others who found prejudice in parts of Labour’s base. Further chapters of this book give examples of each of these phenomena. All of them, this book will

6 Introduction

argue, represent the weakening and in some cases the abandonment of the values of equality and anti-​racism which the left sees as distinguishing us from the right. Seven weeks before the 2019 general election, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis published an article in the Times arguing that no person in Britain could reasonably vote for Corbyn: The party leadership have never understood that their failure is not just one of procedure, which can be remedied with additional staff or new processes. It is a failure to see this as a human problem rather than a political one. It is a failure of culture.28 The Labour Party was, Mirvis argued, institutionally antisemitic: It is a failure of leadership. A new poison –​sanctioned from the top –​has taken root in the Labour party ... When 12 December arrives, I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.29 The partisan nature of that intervention was shocking –​and was intended to be. For the Chief Rabbi was saying not merely to Jews but to every British voter that he was their moral conscience. In an election campaign which could end in only two possible outcomes, a Boris Johnson or a Jeremy Corbyn victory, the former was the only legitimate outcome. The subject of this book is Corbyn and not Johnson. But any moral charge sheet against the latter could hardly be shorter than the criticisms levelled at Corbyn. Johnson had emerged onto the national stage as a journalist. His best-​known single campaign ran from 1989 to 1994 when, as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, he circulated a vast number of false claims that the European Commission intended to introduce same size “eurocoffins”, establish a “banana police force”, and ban prawn cocktail crisps.30 This mendacity helped to create the conditions for the Brexit campaign, with its combination of paranoia, fantasy, and racism. By 2015, Corbyn had had a long career in which he repeatedly supported underdogs admittedly without always looking as closely at what they had done as he should have, and this book criticises him for that failure. Johnson was much the same, indifferent to the faults of the causes in which he believed, save that his campaigns were those of the rich and powerful. For the sake of his friends, he would tolerate violence, as in the case of his childhood acquaintance Darius Guppy, with whom Johnson was recorded discussing plans to attack and injure an over-​inquisitive journalist.31 Finally, Boris Johnson has been far from immune to the fault of racism, comparing Muslim women to “letterboxes”, and labelling black Africans “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”.32 In a 2004 novel, Seventy-​Two Virgins, Johnson created a Jewish character called Sammy Katz who had a “proud nose and curly hair”, relied on “immigrant labour” and sent his son “pathetic presents, every five years, of low-​ denomination bills”.33

Introduction  7

Mirvis was not suggesting that these two records needed to be placed side by side, and that Corbyn’s mistakes over antisemitism had brought him to such a low point that he might be plausibly seen in such wretched company as the Conservative leader. He was saying rather that Corbyn’s errors were incomparably worse –​to the extent that Johnson had become a paragon of virtue and the guardian of “the very soul of our nation”. In the same week as the Chief Rabbi’s comments, the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge Richard Evans posted on Twitter that he was likely to vote for Labour.34 Now, this should not have been news: Evans is a long-​standing socialist whose first book was a history of the women’s movement in Germany, and whose recent books have included a sympathetic biography of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.35 He had, moreover, played a proud role in fighting antisemitism. At the end of the 1990s, after the US historian Deborah Lipstadt was sued for libel by the writer David Irving, Evans gave months of his life to supporting her defence as an expert witness, showing in detail how Irving had falsified the documents as part of a project of exculpating Adolf Hitler from blame for the Holocaust.36 In 2019, Evans acknowledged that antisemitism had in his words “infected” the Labour Party. He insisted, however, that British politics needed to be seen in its totality, and that a Conservative government would be worse.37 For suggesting that there was any calculation to be made, Evans was denounced. Several hundred people replied. In response to a first tweet, Evans was told that he was “complicit”38 in antisemitism and “condon[ing] racism”.39 After he posted a second time, Evans was told that he was on the same side as David Irving. He was accused of “supporting antisemitism”,40 of “enabling” it, and of “hav[ing] no scruples”.41 Several people tweeted that Evans was no different to those who had voted for Hitler, telling him, “It’s like going back in time to 1930’s Germany”,42 or “You ought to sit in on one of your lectures”.43 Conservative MP Richard Benyon suggested that Evans should be dismissed: I would be really worried if this academic with such a screwed up moral compass was lecturing my child.44 Many of those commenting agreed with Benyon: How are you fit to lecture on history when you are unable to learn from it yourself?45 I weep for the kids going through Uni with such morally bankrupt professors brainwashing them.46 Corbyn’s supporters wanted to answer these criticisms of Evans, to show them as partisan, exaggerated, and filled with the self-​r ighteousness of people who had no interest in understanding discrimination or combatting it. Thirty percent of people in Britain were likely to vote for Labour in the coming election; did these posters

8 Introduction

really think that all of us should be driven out of our jobs, that we were all so tainted with discrimination, and they so free of it? But if the Labour left was serious about responding, we needed to acknowledge the faults on our side. When people responded to Evans’s critics by saying that in the past four years Labour had done nothing wrong, and the crisis was all manufactured, nobody believed them. There needed to be some rational calculus of what exactly the left had got wrong. Only once that had been done could we regroup, and that task was seemingly beyond us. Often, during the 2019 election, the Jewish poet and children’s author Michael Rosen complained: “if you are fighting antisemitism in the Labour Party but not in other political parties, you are not fighting antisemitism, you are fighting Labour”.47 The point was a necessary corrective to an overwhelming press campaign. But something which the Labour left seemed unwilling to acknowledge was that the same logic applied in both directions. When socialists said they were against right-​wing antisemitism but did not speak out when leftists were antisemitic, they were not fighting antisemitism.They were merely fighting the right.Their passivity and denial in the face of prejudice made it harder for the people who were trying to challenge it. To return to the Chief Rabbi: if you reread his letter, what exactly was Mirvis saying that Corbyn had done wrong? Corbyn’s supporters tended to understand him as saying there were now more antisemites within the Labour Party than other parties. They insisted this was untrue. There was in fact little compelling evidence, however, as to how deeply antisemitism went among the members of the party or its voters. In October 2016, the cross-​party Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons had summarised the best available quantitative information on antisemitic opinions within each of Britain main parties. The authors wrote, “A representative YouGov poll carried out in May 2016 found that Labour voters were no more likely than voters from other parties to express antisemitic attitudes, with UK Independence Party (UKIP) voters demonstrating the highest levels of antisemitism”. They concluded, Despite significant press and public attention on the Labour Party, and a number of revelations regarding inappropriate social media content, there exists no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party.48 YouGov polling shows that one in six people in Britain (17 percent) felt Jews thought they were better than other people, and had too much power in the media, while one in ten (11 percent) claimed Jews were not as honest in business as other people. One in five believed their loyalty to Israel made British Jews less loyal to the UK, while one in ten people (ten percent) said they would be unhappy if a relative married a Jew.49 Such polling might be used to show that anti-​Jewish views were no more popular in Labour than anyone else.Yet what it really showed was that in Britain as

Introduction  9

a whole, antisemitic ideas were commonplace. If you were thinking of the Corbyn-​ era Labour Party, with its half a million members as of summer 2016, there must have been tens of thousands of people holding these views. Similarly, in September 2017, a report for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the Community Security Trust, a charity which works with the Board of Deputies in monitoring antisemitism, found that “levels of antisemitism among those on the left-​wing of the political spectrum, including the far-​left, are indistinguishable from those found in the general population”. The place where antisemitism was most common was on the right. “The most antisemitic group on the political spectrum consists of those who identify as very right-​wing: the presence of antisemitic attitudes in this group is 2 to 4 times higher compared to the general population”.50 Supporters of Corbyn’s leadership used such polls to prove that antisemitism went as deep in the Conservatives as it did in Labour, but that did not answer the Chief Rabbi’s point. A better guide to what Mirvis had meant in speaking of a poison taking root is provided by the evidence he had given to the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into antisemitism. There, Mirvis had not compared Labour to the Conservatives but to Labour under Corbyn’s predecessors: “Since the leadership of Mr Corbyn, it has become more acceptable for an element that used to be a fringe group to appear on centre stage and express their ideology in a more open and confident manner”.51 The argument made by Mirvis, and one which resonated with other critics of Corbyn’s leadership, was that Jews expected more of Labour than they did of other parties. The Labour party has an outstanding tradition of dealing with the ills in our society and taking a lead in combating racism. Many Jewish people have been proud members –​rightly so –​of the Labour party, and we want continuity of those values.52 Keith Kahn-​Harris a former editor of the Jewish Quarterly makes the same point: “If you set a high standard, you should expect closer scrutiny”.53 To speak of Jewish people’s trust in Labour as something which had only recently been lost was not convincing.The relationship between Labour and British Jews had been fracturing for years. Prior to Corbyn, Labour’s leader had been Ed Miliband, the first leader of any party in Britain to have identified as Jewish.54 He was attacked by the Daily Mail, which called his historian father Ralph a man who had “hated Britain”, and which remarked that he had been taught at the London School of Economics by the “dangerous Marxist revolutionary” Harold Laski (the brother of Neville Laski, president of the London Committee of the Deputies of British Jews), and suggested that Ralph Miliband’s politics had been “fuelled by a giant-​ sized social chip on his shoulder as he lived in his adopted country”.55 You would like to think that there is a parallel universe in which the Daily Mail journalists of 2016–​19, resplendent in the range with which they denounced antisemitism in all

10 Introduction

its forms, might be asked to read the Daily Mail of 2013, and explain why exactly their colleagues had felt it necessary to so carefully identify Ralph Miliband as an outsider and a Jew. Ed Miliband was attacked two years later by the Sun, which the day before the 2015 election made a front-​page story out of Miliband eating a bacon sandwich clumsily.56 The image was trailed extensively in the election, projecting an image of Miliband as bookish, nerdy, over-​concerned with ideas and impractical –​as untrustworthy because he was a Jew. Despite the way that he and his father were treated in the press as Jews and outsiders, Miliband received only muted support from Jewish groups. In 2014, he was condemned by the actress Maureen Lipman for requiring Labour MPs to support a motion calling for Palestine to be recognised as an independent state. “Come election day”, Lipman wrote, “I shall give my vote to another party”.57 “The Jewish community is preparing to break with Labour”, wrote Telegraph columnist Dan Hodges, as yet another poll showed Jewish support for Labour at a historic low.58 But this was in October 2014, 11 months before Corbyn’s election. For all the tensions between Labour and British Jews, many Jewish people, however they intended to vote, still had higher expectations of the Labour Party than they did of the Conservatives. Distrust of the latter as allies of a resurgent global right was already “factored in”. The seeming appearance of antisemitism on the left was more shocking and notable.59 Indeed, for the sake of the long-​term relationship between Labour and Jewish people, it is desirable that many Jewish people expect Labour and the wider left to be immaculate in the fight against antisemitism. It is a sign not of a guaranteed support but of the potential to re-​establish trust –​a sympathy that Labour was foolish to squander and urgently needs to regain. This book looks not merely at the examples of antisemitism on the British left, but also at the unacknowledged but real assumptions made by many supporters of the campaign against Corbyn. A case will be made that many of the criticisms of the Labour Party themselves rested on patterns of distorted and ideological reasoning which are of disservice to any principled struggle against antisemitism. Examples of this approach include the claims: •

•

•

That antisemitism was a unique evil, with a distinct history, and thus required a vocabulary and a set of approaches which were significantly different from those employed against other forms of racism (Chapters 2–​3); That because the Labour Party (and, behind it, the wider left) has been uniquely antisemitic, it would be a mistake to acknowledge the presence of antisemitism elsewhere within politics including the part played in the global rise of antisemitism by Donald Trump and the US right (Chapter 6), whose role in the re-​emergence of prejudice was minimised; That Jewish supporters of Corbyn were “bad” or even “self-​ hating” Jews (Chapter 8);

Introduction  11

•

•

•

•

That when people on the Labour left sought to protect anti-​Zionist Jews from exaggerated criticism, they were mistaken to do so and institutionally racist (Chapter 10); That there exist a set of attributes, for example, a practice of accumulating money selfishly and destructively at other people’s expense, which (irrespective of who does it) cannot be rationally discussed as any part of normal politics since any mention of such behaviour is in danger of repeating antisemitic myths (Chapter 12); That the fate of Jewish people is inextricably bound up with the fate of a series of nation states abroad. They include Israel, as well as Israel’s allies in Eastern Europe, so that where states prosper on the basis of widespread and open antisemitic abuse, or seek to deny or even criminalise the study of the Holocaust, criticisms of them could be made but should be muted, since these nations are allies of Israel and therefore to be defended (Chapter 14); That Labour’s problems with antisemitism have come about, to a significant extent, because of that party’s commitment to opposing anti-​black and anti-​ Asian racism, and that any rescuing of the Labour Party’s moral compass can be achieved only by diluting that party’s previous commitment to these forms of anti-​racism (Chapter 16).

This book does not argue that all Corbyn’s opponents subscribed to the above theories (any more than that all Corbyn’s supporters were blithe to antisemitism). But these ideas could be seen operating on the minds of key supporters of the right.

Notes 1 I accept the argument that the word should be spelled in this way so as to avoid legitimising the pseudo-​ scientific category of “Semite”. Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism (Chicago: JVP, 2017), p. v. 2 D. Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999); D. Renton, Fascism, Anti-​Fascism and the 1940s (London: Macmillan Press, 2000); D. Renton and N. Copsey, British Fascism, the Labour Movement, and the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); D. Renton, Never Again: Rock against Racism and the Anti-​Nazi League 1976–​1982 (London: Routledge, 2018); and D. Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London: Pluto Press, 2019; Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket, 2019). 3 For a history of the term, beginning with its use by right-​wing politicians in Germany from 1879, D. Feldman, ‘Toward a History of the Term “Antisemitism”,’ American Historical Review 123/​4 (2018), pp. 1139–​1150. 4 D. Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Phoenix, 1994); M. Blinkhorn, Mussolini and Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 1994). 5 S. Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London:Viking, 2006). 6 T. Weber, Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 250–​253. Adam Sutcliffe notes the role played by Jewish leftists including Eisner and Gustav Landauer in the Bavarian Free State and terms it the most vivid “cross-​fertilization” in European history between “Jewish messianism and revolutionary radicalism”. A. Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 243.

12 Introduction

7 For examples of former socialists being won over to Italian or German fascism, D. Guérin, The Brown Plague:Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994); D. D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979); O. Dahl, Syndicalism, Fascism and Post-​Fascism in Italy 1900–​1950 (Oslo: Sorlum Forlag, 1990). 8 N. Farage, ‘Hard-​Left, Jew-​Hating, Anti-​Israel Extremists Now Run the Labour Party,’ Breitbart, 5 May 2016; ‘Nick Griffin Declares His Support for Jeremy Corbyn,’ New Statesman, 10 April 2018; ‘Board of Deputies Condemns Flyers Urging Jews to Back Tommy Robinson,’ Jewish Chronicle, 23 May 2019. 9 V.Witting, ‘German Politicians Slam Right-​wing Populist Afd over Rising Antisemitism,’ Deutsche Welle, 18 October 2019. 10 J. Mulhall, ‘Waters and Sellner Speak at Traditional Britain Group Conference,’ Hope Not Hate, 22 October 2017. 11 ‘TBG Conference 2013: Richard Spencer –​Why We Need Europe,’ Traditional Britain Group, 25 October 2013. 12 M. Moore, ‘Brexit: Jacob Rees-​Mogg Attacks BBC “Lefty Obsession” with AfD Tweet,’ Times, 4 April 2019. 13 A. LeBor, ‘It Is Not Antisemitic to Ask Questions about George Soros,’ Times, 8 October 2019. 14 ‘On the Referendum #34: Batsignal!! Don’t Let Corbyn-​Sturgeon Cheat a Second Referendum with Millions of Foreign Votes,’ dominiccummings.com, 27 November 2019. Also ‘On the Referendum #24j: Collins, Grandstanding, Empty Threats & the Plan for a Rematch against the Public,’ dominiccummings.com, 24 May 2018; ‘On the Referendum #9: Cameron Begins His Renegotiation, the Commission Sets Out Its Timetable for New Treaty Pre-​2025, BJ & SJ Make Moves, a Greek “No”,’ dominiccummings.com, 6 July 2015. 15 ‘Donations and Loans Reported by Campaigners at the EU Referendum,’ Electoral Commission, 29 July 2019 16 M. Kinsley, ‘How to Think About: Jewish Bankers,’ The Atlantic, 29 January 2010. 17 L. Staples, ‘Dominic Cummings’ Latest Blog Post Branded “Racist” and “Antisemitic”,’ Independent, 28 November 2019; S. Boscia,‘Dominic Cummings Is Quitting Government, but Not for the Reason You Think,’ City AM, 28 November 2019. 18 L. Harpin, ‘Tory Party Accused of “Inaction” over Antisemitism Investigation into MPs,’ Jewish Chronicle, 13 July 2020; J. Mendel, ‘Two Tories Win Seats Despite Investigations over Antisemitism,’ Jewish News, 13 December 2019; K. Proctor, ‘Tories Investigate Three Candidates over Alleged Antisemitism,’ Guardian, 7 December 2019. 19 P. Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-​ Bolshevism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 91. 20 A. Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), pp. 150–​151. 21 J. Carr, ‘New Attorney General Suella Braverman belongs to controversial Buddhist sect that still venerates its founder despite claims he was a serial sexual predator,’ Daily Mail, 16 February 2020. 22 J. Neuberger, Antisemitism.What It Is.What It Isn’t.Why It Matters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), p. 139. 23 F. Beckett and M. Seddon, Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England (London: Biteback, 2018), p. 282. 24 ‘Black History Month,’ Hansard, 20 October 2020. 25 J. Mortimer, ‘Exclusive: Leading Tories Challenged for Using Phrase Linked to “Antisemitic Dog-​whistle”,’ Left Foot Forward, 11 November 2020.

Introduction  13

26 Antisemitism Policy Trust Special Briefing, Cultural Marxism: An Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory? (London: Antisemitism Policy Trust), p. 4. 27 G. Philo, M. Berry, J. Schlosberg,A. Lerman, and D. Miller, Bad News for Labour:Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief (London: Pluto, 2019), p. vii. 28 R. Mason, ‘Labour Has Let Poison of Antisemitism Take Root, Says Chief Rabbi,’ Guardian, 26 November 2019. 29 Mason, ‘Labour Has Let Poison.’ 30 P. Stubley, ‘Boris Johnson: The Most Infamous Lies and Untruths by the Conservative Leadership Candidate,’ Independent, 24 May 2019. 31 J. Coe, ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea,’ London Review of Books, 18 July 2013. 32 A. Bienkov, ‘Boris Johnson Called Gay Men “Tank-​Topped Bumboys” and Black People “Piccaninnies” with “Watermelon Smiles”,’ Business Insider, 9 June 2020. 33 J. Stone, ‘Boris Johnson Book Depicts Jews as Controlling the Media,’ Independent, 9 December 2019; M. Frot, ‘Boris Johnson Accused of Invoking “Pernicious Antisemitic Tropes” in Books,’ Jewish News, 10 December 2019. 34 @RichardEvans36, Twitter, 24 and 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 35 R. J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–​1933 (London: Sage, 1976); R. J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (London: Little, Brown, 2019). 36 E. J. Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (London: Verso, 2001). 37 @RichardEvans36, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 38 @slowhands27, Twitter, 24 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 39 @daveyruss, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 40 @MichaelSpeakm19, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 41 @youdonewhat, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 42 @Veroan_​RS, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 43 @BobBarnehurst, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 44 @RichardHRBenyon, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 45 @Martles1, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 46 @Fabledsoul, Twitter, 25 November 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 47 @lynnejones_​exMP, Twitter, 12 December 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 48 Home Affairs Committee, Antisemitism in the UK (London: House of Commons, 2016), p. 46. 49 B. Quinn, ‘Almost Half of Britons Hold Antisemitic View, Poll Suggests,’ Guardian, 14 January 2015. 50 L. D. Staetsky, Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain (London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research and Community Security Trust, 2017), p. 6. 51 Home Affairs Committee, Oral Evidence: Antisemitism, HC 136, Thursday 14 July 2016. 52 Home Affairs Committee, Oral Evidence. 53 K. Kahn-​Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity (London: Repeater, 2019), p. 21. 54 The Conservatives had of course been led in the nineteenth century by Benjamin Disraeli. However, he had converted to Christianity at the age of 13. T. M. Endelman, ‘Disraeli’s Jewishness Reconsidered,’ Modern Judaism 5/​2 (1985), pp. 109–​123. 55 S. Rocker, ‘Daily Mail Accused of Antisemitism over Miliband Story,’ Jewish Chronicle, 3 October 2013. 56 K. Kahn-​Harris, ‘Is the Sun’s “Save Our Bacon” Election Front Page Antisemitic?’ Guardian, 6 May 2015.

14 Introduction

57 I. Johnston, ‘Maureen Lipman Says, “She Can’t Vote Labour While Ed Miliband Is Leader”,’ Independent, 30 October 2014. Lipman later criticised Corbyn. C. Mandle, ‘Maureen Lipman Claims Jeremy Corbyn “Sups with the Devil” and Warns People to Be “Very,Very Afraid” of Labour Leader,’ Independent, 5 October 2015. 58 D. Hodges, ‘The Jewish Community Is Preparing to Break with Labour,’ Telegraph, 30 October 2014. 59 Neuberger, Antisemitism.

2 THE UNIQUENESS OF ANTISEMITISM

It is usual, in a book on antisemitism, to begin with a definition of what antisemitism is. One of the risks of doing so, however, is that it can give the impression of treating anti-​Jewish racism as if it follows a different logic from other forms of racism. It is easy to see why writers might do that: antisemitism has a different history from other forms of racism. It has at times focussed on different things: not the seeming physical difference between black and white,1 but the supposed invisibility of Jews, their perceived ability to meet, to conspire, and to plan.2 What I want to do here, however, is something different: that is, to invite readers to grasp both the ways in which antisemitism is different from other forms of racism, and how it is tangled up with them.3

What is different about antisemitism? Antisemitism can perform a different political function from other forms of prejudice, and for that reason it has a capacity to endure and return, even after moments when the crimes of antisemitism were well-​known, widely discussed, and generally deprecated. All forms of racism combine fear, fantasy, bogus science, and political expedience. They have emerged in relationship to great historical events such as colonialism, the slave trade, and the rise of the workers’ and women’s movements. Racism legitimates unequal accesses to resources and justifies punitive violence against racial outsiders. They create an imagined community of interest between groups of people who might otherwise be acknowledged to be divided by class, ethnicity, and so on. They involve, as Eamonn McCann wrote of the sectarian bigotry which once encouraged Protestant workers to support Unionism in Northern Ireland, “Tuppence half-​penny looking down on tuppence”.4 To a greater extent than most other racisms, antisemitism encourages its believers to attack both people they imagine to be “above” and people they imagine to be

16  The uniqueness of antisemitism

“below” them. It imagines workers’ organisations controlled by poor Jews and also bosses’ combines in which Jewish plutocrats dominate. It encourages its supporters in their paranoia and spreads and generalises it.5 To give one contemporary illustration of why this is important: before 2016, the dominant form of politics to the right of conservatism in the United States was libertarianism, in other words, the belief that the state was already too large and should be shrunk. The racialisation of groups other than Jews fitted particularly well with this world view, since it encouraged white people in the United States to see black people, Muslims, Latino, and other racialised groups as competitors in conflicts over welfare benefits. Racialising black bodies caused white people to agree to a form of politics in which rich people paid fewer taxes and redistribution was thwarted. Thus, on the American right in 1980, 1995, or 2010, few political opinions were less popular than antisemitism which was seen even by most partisans of the right as an embarrassing relic of the past.6 Since 2016, however, the growing forces on the political right have wanted not to shrink the state but to expand it. They have needed explanations for why, for example, large numbers of white people oppose them, including large parts of the press and groups of opinion-​formers. Antisemitism is capable of answering these questions, by the pretence that a few significantly placed Jews dominate the media and Hollywood. An insurgent far right makes use of antisemitism, inside which it plays a different role to anti-​black or anti-​Muslim racism. One of the reasons why antisemitism is capable of playing this function is because it is mobile. Once an idea has been introduced at any point of the political spectrum, other people can also be shaped by it. The antisemite insists that our economic system is, or would be, the best of all possible worlds if only it were possible to achieve the removal of a tiny number of well-​placed Jews, and to leave everything else –​capital, labour, and rent –​in the same situation as before.Through the lens of a leftist view of the world, the antisemitic understanding of capitalism seems ridiculously shallow. Yet, superficial as it might be, antisemitism is still at times a critique of how things are,7 and for that reason it is capable of appealing to conservatives, to liberals, to leftists, and to anyone looking for a quick and facile explanation of why the world has gone wrong.

What is the same? Having acknowledged the differences between antisemitism and other forms of racism, we also need to grasp that while the logic of one strand of racism might be different from another, ultimately all kinds of racism have certain entangled forms. This idea that racisms can be essentially similar despite their different expression will be familiar to anyone who has thought about colour-​based racism in post-​war Britain. So, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for racists to distinguish between different kinds of racial communities: treating people of African or Caribbean heritage as a part of the working class or beneath it while treating some

The uniqueness of antisemitism  17

people of Asian ancestry as outside the working class and above it.8 Even academic literature has at times shared this assessment of groups of black British people as being essentially “working class” or of British Asians as inherently “middle class”.9 Such ideas can rise or fall, often with very little connection to anything done by the people they purport to describe. Often, they tell you far more about the society making these assumptions and its need to classify than they do about the people who are subject to that stereotyping. The anti-​racist movements of the 1970s which are remembered with the most fondness today are groups such as the Race Today Collective,10 or the Asian Youth Movements,11 which grasped both what particular communities suffered and the general picture. They realised that while anti-​black and anti-​Asian racisms might focus on different imagined characteristics, and even seek to set different ethnic minority communities against each other, both groups suffered discriminatory treatment in housing and employment, intrusive policing, and violent attacks by hardened racists.To be subject to any of these harms was sufficient to make someone the potential subject of a broad project of anti-​racist resistance. In the past 35 years, and in particular since 9/​11, Islamophobia has come to play a new and enhanced role, as an organising ideology within global politics. It has backed up the American and British wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the repressive laws and police practices which accompanied them, ranging from instructions to schools and universities to monitor Muslim students, through anti-​terror measures which have relocated British Muslims or removed them from access to homes or welfare benefits, to forced deportations and even indefinite detention without trial.12 The events of 9/​11 and its aftermath merged with 1945 in our collective imagination, displacing an older narrative in which the events of the Holocaust were a proof that all forms of racism were wrong. Particularly between ca. 2003 and ca. 2015, this enabled the growth of an anti-​Islamist right, in which conservatives and those further to their right allied.13 As early as 1989, right at the start of this process of the renewal of anti-​Muslim sentiment, the British Syrian cultural historian Rana Kabbani suggested that the hate which had culminated in the Holocaust was now being redirected from Jews to Muslims, “I have come to think that antisemitism, endemic in western culture, has more or less been forced underground”. Overt antisemitism had become unacceptable; the same taboo did not extend to anti-​Muslim sentiment: There has been a transfer of contempt from Jews to Muslims in secular Western culture today. Many Muslims share this fear: indeed, one has written that “the next time there are gas chambers in Europe, there is no doubt concerning who’ll be inside them”.14 In the years after 9/​11 this sense became much more widespread. A number of social scientists observed that much of what was treated as specific to anti-​Jewish racism was now being used against Muslims. They too were being spoken of as in thrall to their religious heritage, infiltrating the West, and in hoc to extremist

18  The uniqueness of antisemitism

doctrines with Islamic fundamentalism playing much the same role in the racist mindset as the Marxism that racists had previously blamed on the Jews.15 Despite the intention of Kabbani and other writers to show the similarities between different forms of unwanted views, and to prevent an escalating dynamic of Jewish-​Muslim antagonism,16 this idea, or thinking like it, contributed to Labour’s antisemitism crisis. The myth of the Jewish conspirator had not disappeared, contempt had not simply “transfer[red]” to another group, as if this process was irreversible, and antisemitic prejudice was now exhausted. For centuries, Europeans and Americans had taught themselves that behind every crime there was a Jewish hand.17 That way of seeing the world was challenged as the popular understanding of the Holocaust, and revulsion with it, grew in the United States and in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, but it never went away. For that reason, even in an age when there have been black or Muslim bankers on Wall Street, the fiction that the economy was secretly controlled by Jewish bankers remained of considerable useful to those who would spread prejudice. In addition, the co-​existence of anti-​Jewish and anti-​Muslim racism was not something new18 but went back to the colonial period in which “Jew”, “Muslim”, and “Arab” were labels to distinguish the objects of empire from their rulers by their dress, skin colour, food, and so on. Ethan Katz gives the example of Algeria, where imperialism had to navigate the contradictory urges of violent conquest and the supposed universalism of 1789. “At the level of electoral politics and intellectual discourse”, he writes, “among the French settler classes, antisemitism was a widely endorsed program, central to a worldview that was openly hostile to the premises and legal protections of liberal democracy”. White settlers adopted an Islamophilia that positioned Muslims as Jews’ more positive Semitic twin. “Yet in government policy, the positions of the two groups were –​with the important exception of the Vichy period –​reversed”. After 1870, most Algerian Jews were treated as full French citizens, while Muslims were refused equal treatment.19 As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, the casualties of racism “Don’t resemble one another. Each of them has a distinctive physique and distinctive features, different eyes and a different name and age”.20 So it is with prejudice: its sources are multiple and unique. And yet the essential logic of racism is the recurring idea that as a result of some inherited qualities, two people have a different worth. One person is entitled to be heard and to have full citizenship rights –​ another person has less value than them. In the racist worldview, a black person can never be the equal of a white. The same reasoning applies to Muslims: they remain a Muslim, even if they renounce their religion. The same applies to a Jew.21

The IHRA definition: origins and controversy In May 2016, just as Labour’s antisemitism crisis was becoming headline news, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) issued what it termed a “non-​legally-​binding working definition of antisemitism”.The definition holds that:

The uniqueness of antisemitism  19

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed towards Jewish or non-​Jewish individuals and/​or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.22 The origins of the IHRA definition lie in the body of another organisation, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC),23 which has as one of its purposes the collection of data about racist incidents. As David Hirsh, a writer who supports the definition, explains, the EUMC guidance was drawn up after the September 2001 World Conference against Racism had been held in Durban in South Africa.24 There is a long tradition within South Africa of support for Palestine, shaped by the support given by Israel’s governments to the previous apartheid regime in South Africa. Both Israel and apartheid South Africa were established in the same year, 1948. Israel sold arms, including nuclear weapons, to South Africa. Israel was almost alone in the world in providing financial support to South Africa’s Bantustans: black enclaves, their leaders appointed from Pretoria, who were allowed to declare formal independence while remaining under apartheid military control, and therefore offering a prospect of “black majority rule” in which power would remain indefinitely in white hands. By 1983, Israel had donated $250 million to one of these territories, Bophuthatswana, which operated a de facto embassy in Tel Aviv.25 Again, in 1986, Israel was one of a handful of countries to oppose sanctions against apartheid.26 Several speeches were made at Durban criticising Israeli policy in relation to the Palestinians. A draft document was put before 7,000 delegates urging the United Nations to accept that Israel was a “discriminatory” state, and that Palestinians could resist “occupation by any means”,27 after which the Israeli and American delegations withdrew. Leaflets were handed out at the event including one showing a picture of Hitler looking impassive and with the text, “What if I had won? The good things: there would be NO Israel and NO Palestinians’ bloodshed. The bad things: I wouldn’t have allowed the making of the new Beetle”.28 Another showed a cartoon of an Israeli soldier with a hooked nose and a helmet showing both the Star of David and a swastika.29 The event also included a demonstration through Durban during which thousands of protesters marched through the city’s streets wearing official t-​shirts printed with the slogan “Apartheid Is/​Real”.30 One banner read, “The martyrs’ blood irrigates the tree of revolution in Palestine”.31 In the aftermath of Durban, representatives of the European Jewish Congress met with the EU, insisting there needed to be a mechanism for monitoring antisemitic incidents including anti-​Zionist rhetoric which might morph into antisemitism. Delegates to a 2005 May Congress of the Organisation for Security and Co-​operation in Europe backed this call.32 The EUMC invited a lawyer Kenneth Stern from the American Jewish Committee against Antisemitism to draw up a working guide which might help with assessing the number of antisemitic incidents in Europe. In evidence given to

20  The uniqueness of antisemitism

a committee of the House of Representatives in 2017, Kenneth Stern insisted that his intention had been purely to facilitate data collection: The definition was drafted to make it easier for data collectors to know what to put in their reports and what to reject. It focused their attention away from the question of whether the actor hated Jews and focused them on whether the actor selected Jews to be victims.33 Because the definition was drafted, he wrote, with data collectors utmost in mind, there needed to be examples which could be used to clarify when behaviour crossed the line. “The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech”.34 Stern is now a high-​profile campaigner for freedom of speech on Israel and Palestine, and the author of a memoir warning (amongst other things) of the exaggeration of antisemitic incidents on American campuses. “The definition was not perfect”, Stern acknowledges, with some rueful understatement,35 or, as he writes later in the same book, the IHRA definition “has become a sacred symbol for much of the Jewish community ... [but] it is difficult to have a rational discussion where a sacred symbol tied to your identity and well-​being is seen as under attack”.36 The diversion away from the original emphasis on data collection has caused Stern to complain about the way in which the IHRA is used in Britain. Here, he argues, it is being employed to silence legitimate speech. Stern has compared figures here who have misused his definition to the American followers of the renegade American senator Joe McCarthy who spent the 1950s promoting the blacklist of Communists, and made censorship pervasive in the United States: An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the university mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition.37 Universities, Stern insisted, should be a zone of permitted speech. But the way pro-​ Israel groups used the definition was making that impossible: An off-​campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before38 ... the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-​like.39 The definition could be found on the website of the EUMC (and its successor the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights) between 2005 and 2013. It was revived by the IHRA in 2016. By September 2020, some 28 countries had adopted the definition.40

The uniqueness of antisemitism  21

As a working definition, intended only to enable the collection of data from different countries on a consistent basis, the IHRA definition might well have served a useful purpose. As an authoritative statement of what antisemitism is, and one which might be used to resolve real-​life disputes, however, it is plainly inadequate to that task. The problems with it are grammatical and logical. Imagine a different sentence which had the same structure: Yellow is a certain colour, which may be used in painting. Physical manifestations of the colour appear in paintings, in photographs... The statement would be true but it is not a definition of yellow.To understand what yellow is, you must have something to compare it to, the skin of a lemon perhaps or of certain kinds of apple, in the same way that a metre is one ten-​millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. The IHRA definition says that we should look for a certain perception of Jews, but not what that perception is. It says that this undefined perception of Jews “may” be expressed as hatred of Jews –​but the definition does not explain what else other than hatred qualifies. It fails to explain what the perception is that makes a speech or an act antisemitic. What if a person perceived that Jews were unusually bookish, or argumentative? All these are widely shared perceptions of Jews and are frequently held by Jewish people to characterise other Jews.41 So do such ideas fall within the definition? The definition does not give an answer, either way. Unusually, the IHRA definition came with examples of what constituted antisemitic behaviour. They were prefaced with a cautious note of warning, and by a stress on the importance of context. “Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include...”42 Unfortunately, that verb “could” has tended to get lost in subsequent discussions. Given the vagueness of the main definition, these examples have taken on unusual significance. But, again, they fail to explain what the perception of Jews is which might enable us to understand whether an act or a speech is antisemitic or not. Here is the first of the examples: Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion. The first half of the sentence feels as if it comes closer to what most people understand by an antisemitic incident. But the example invites us to imagine something like the following scenario: there is a Jewish man or woman lying in the street, someone has punched them. (That someone might be anyone –​even a fellow Jew.) How do we know if the attack was antisemitic? We know, the definition tells us, if the attack was done in the name of a radical ideology or religion. But the point at which ideologies or religions are worth noticing is not simply when they are radical or extremist (Revisionist Zionism can compete with any

22  The uniqueness of antisemitism

other ideology for “radicalism”; or Millenarian Judaism for “extremism”). The moment at which an ideology becomes worth watching is when it combines its extremism with a recurring hostility to Jews. Contrary to the IHRA definition, in other words, antisemitism is not merely “a certain perception of Jews” –​it must refer to a hostile perception of Jews.43 In the core body of the IHRA definition there is no mention of Israel. However, more than half of the examples attached to the definition (seven out of eleven) refer to criticisms of the state of Israel. Among them are the following: •

• •

Manifestations (of antisemitism) might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Applying double standards by requiring of (the state of Israel) a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-​determination, for example, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.44

Reading these carefully, it is clear that one of the main purposes of the IHRA definition has been to bring into the public mind the idea that antisemitism might often be manifested not as hostility towards a people (Jews) but as hostility towards a state (Israel) which is then perceived in ethnic terms (the state of the Jews). So, while the drafters acknowledged that some criticisms of Israeli policy were legitimate, any claim that Israel is racist (e.g., because it is founded on the dispossession of its Palestinian population, or because it operates differential citizenship laws for the Jewish and non-​Jewish people within its borders) is suspect and capable of being antisemitic. The development of the IHRA definition can be placed within a longer context: since 1967, pro-​Israeli scholars have been warning of the danger of the rise of a “new” antisemitism, located as much on the left of global politics as on the right. (You might remark how trapped our language is and how sterile the debate beneath it, that we still speak of such antisemitism as “new” when its existence has been under discussion continuously for more than 50 years.) Those who perceive most antisemitism as new have drawn up definitions designed to highlighting the harm of those opinions.45 The IHRA definition is one of them. But equally, there have been left-​ wing definition of antisemitism which have emphasised the “old” nature of antisemitism, its expression in forms such as the belief that Jews were responsible for both communism and capitalism, or the charge that the Holocaust was invented by Jews.46 If we see those kinds of acts as the core, defining, form of antisemitism, then we should expect antisemitism to be located predominantly on the far right, which shares with many antisemites a belief in Hitler’s essential innocence and the need to champion a radical politics that rejects both the left and the right (i.e., both the mythical Jewish workers and their imagined Jewish bosses). During Labour’s crisis, one group of people accused the left of anti-​Jewish racism, and another group insisted that the left was free of this taint –​this was a dispute of

The uniqueness of antisemitism  23

fact. It could not be resolved by any definition of antisemitism (whether that was the IHRA’s focussing on new antisemitism targeting Israel or other definitions insisting on the old nature of modern antisemitism) which assumed the presence or absence of what required to be proved. The authors of the IHRA definition cite, as one example of antisemitism: Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective –​such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government, or other societal institutions.47 In contrast to the authors of the IHRA definition, this example will not be treated in this text as a subordinate matter (just one out of 11 examples of antisemitism, all of equal significance to the others), but the passage which gives meaning to the rest of the definition. What it conveys is not merely that antisemitism is a form of hostility –​although that is important –​but some of the ways in which that antipathy is expressed. Moreover, it is one capable of drawing your eye to either instances of old or new antisemitism. Imagine, for example, that a member of the Labour Party says: “I hate Zionists. British politicians dance to their tune”.This could be old antisemitism in that it invokes long-​standing fantasies of Jewish conspiracy and control. It could also be new antisemitism, in that it has displaced the figure of fear from Jews to supporters of Israel. Or suppose that someone else says, “Supporters of the Labour right are in the pay of Israel”. This too could be interpreted as either old or new antisemitism. It invokes old ideas of British Jews as foreigners whose loyalties lie beyond the border of Britain, and it places them in relationship to a second group of people (supporters of the Israeli state) who can buy their control of global politics through their dominance of finance and money. It is also new antisemitism, in that the fear of Jews takes place through the unspoken but real assumption that Israel is “the Jews”. If we focus on this notion of stereotypical allegations, and fantasies of conspiracy or control, there is no need to either assume or deny that this will often take the form of language about Israel and “Israelis” rather than “Jews”. For plainly those categories can be, and repeatedly have been, used interchangeably. But, at the same time, some of what the IHRA treats as antisemitism is legitimate criticism of Israel. As the American campaigning group Jews for Racial & Economic Justice insists, “Criticisms of Israel and Zionism are not inherently or inevitably anti-​Jewish. All states, movements and ideologies should be scrutinized, and all forms of injustice denounced. It is not anti-​Jewish to denounce oppressive acts committed by Jews”.48 There is, in other words, as the IHRA drafters also accepted, a line to be drawn between criticisms of the state of Israel which treat its actions as wrong because it is a Jewish state, and criticisms made from a justice perspective which is applied to all other states. If that was all the IHRA said about Israel or Palestine, it would not be unreasonable.

24  The uniqueness of antisemitism

The problem with the use of the IHRA definition is that in seeking to police criticisms of Israel, those who promote it draw the line inconsistently. In writing that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”, the drafters appear to have accepted that some but not all criticisms of the state of Israel cross over the line into antisemitism. But in treating the following as antisemitic, they seemed to go further: 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.49 That broader definition appears to prohibit many or most criticisms of Israel. It would restrict writers from acknowledging, for example, the history of the wars through which Israel was created, the removal of Palestinians which took place in 1948, the effect of war in 1967 in enabling further population transfer from the West Bank and in further subordinating those Palestinians who remained,50 or the laws which make Israeli by definition a Jewish and not a multi-​ethnic state. To say, specifically, that Israel’s 1950 Law of Return, gives non-​Israeli Jews the right to live in Israel while (in practice) Palestinians are excluded from citizenship rights in the same territory is a simple statement of fact. To go from there to saying that Israel is a “racist endeavour”, in other words, a society which awards citizenship rights on an arbitrary and racist basis, is an inference and a statement of opinion. An earnest supporter of Israel might criticise it as hyperbolic, or misleading because it fails to account for the history which led to the passage of that law, or on any other ground that suits them. But it is not a racist statement. The IHRA drafters plainly thought that it was and it is worth unpicking the logic which brought them to that conclusion.Their unacknowledged and unarticulated argument appears to have followed each of the following steps: 1 . The Jews are a people;51 2. All peoples are entitled to their own state (“self-​determination”); 3. The present constitution of Israel (this present Israel) is the only possible Jewish state imaginable; therefore any criticisms of its laws is to attack the very idea of any country where Jews might live freely (“a state of Israel”); 4. All states are entitled to exclude whole groups of other people from citizenship on directly racial grounds; 5. To restrict this right from Israel alone is to oppose Israel unfairly; and 6. Because Israel is the state of the Jews, denying Jews alone the chance to exclude other people is to treat Jews unfairly.52 What has happened, in other words, that in order to oppose anti-​Jewish racism, sincere anti-​racists are expected to sign up to a complex theory of recent history and of politics which exists behind the text and in an unadmitted but real relationship to it.

The uniqueness of antisemitism  25

Almost nothing in the above set of assertions is compelling, step (4) least of all, which is a defence of racialised citizenship categories and racial exclusion. It is a politics which treats the postwar “whites only” immigration policies of postwar Australia, Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa as if they had been the norm, rather than politics which were controversial and defeated.53 It is the equivalent of saying that the British are a people, and are predominantly white, and as such they are entitled to deport all black citizens from that country –​or France all its Muslims. “It cannot be”, writes Judith Butler, “that the only way to refute the charge of antisemitism in these debates is to embrace injustice, inequality and dispossession”.54 Or, in the words of 100 Palestinian and other Arab writers and academics who wrote to the Guardian in November 2020, The demand by Palestinians for their right of return to the land from which they themselves, their parents and grandparents were expelled cannot be construed as antisemitic.The fact that such a demand creates anxieties among Israelis does not prove that it is unjust, nor that it is antisemitic.55 As a definition, the IHRA fails to deliver what it promises.56 The IHRA definition ties us to a theory of what Israel is and the legitimacy of her history and her laws –​without properly acknowledging that purpose or arguing through the politics which underpins it. Those who argue for it want to tie two different things together which are separate: the legitimacy of the policies of a state and the questions of whether antisemitism is rising and the forms it takes.

Where else to begin This book therefore seeks to refocus away from what often seemed most important during the controversy within Labour, in other words, whether one group of people were correct when they argued that antisemitism and anti-​Zionism overlapped, or another group of people were right when they argued that antisemitism and anti-​Zionism were usually distinct. To begin with the assumption that one, and only one, of these approaches is right cannot be the appropriate starting point for any compelling definition of antisemitism. The simplest way to understand antisemitism is as racism when that racism targets at Jews. One of the small and welcome but almost unnoticed aspects of the press story was that the longer it went on the more that those who criticised the Labour left (the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, Jewish Labour Movement [JLM], the Union of Jewish Students, etc.) tended to speak of “anti-​ Jewish racism” rather than “antisemitism”.57 This move, although partial and seemingly untheorised, was a sign of people thinking in the right direction. In this book, when there is a dispute as to whether an act was antisemitic, a first attempt is made to resolve it by drawing on the UK (and the EU’s) discrimination law, that is, on concepts of direct and indirect discrimination on grounds of race,

26  The uniqueness of antisemitism

racial harassment, and so on, which are widely used and untainted by controversy. These definitions take no interest in “why” a particular racism appears; they focus rather on “how” it does. They are deliberately intended to catch all forms of racism (and indeed all forms of structural discrimination), whoever it is aimed at. So, under our law, a crime is antisemitic if: [T]‌he offender demonstrates towards the victim of the offence hostility based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership) of a racial or religious group.58 And if the relevant racial group is that the victim is or perceived to be a Jew. Meanwhile, our civil law prohibits direct discrimination: [I]‌f, because of a protected characteristic, A treats B less favourably than A treats or would treat others.59 The law prohibits indirect discrimination: [A]‌provision, criterion or practice is discriminatory in relation to a relevant protected characteristic of B’s if –​... A applies, or would apply, it to persons with whom B does not share the characteristic, [and] it puts, or would put, persons with whom B shares the characteristic at a particular disadvantage when compared with persons with whom B does not share it.60 Our civil law also prohibits harassment: [U]‌nwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, which has the purpose or effect of (i) violating B’s dignity, or (ii) creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for B.61 And it prohibits victimisation: A person (A) victimises another person (B) if A subjects B to a detriment because –​B does a protected act ... [including] making an allegation (whether or not express) that A or another person has contravened this Act.62 If an act fell within one of the above categories, and the relevant racial group was Jews or the protected characteristic was Jewishness, then the act was antisemitic. Without reducing racism (anti-​Jewish or otherwise) to harassment, it is worth focussing on this concept for three further reasons. Between 2016 and 2019, one of the frequent complaints of the Labour Party’s critics was that Labour had failed to take on board a reform proposed by Sir William Macpherson, when investigating the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. He, too, had discussed data collection. The police, Macpherson suggested, should record any incident as racist

The uniqueness of antisemitism  27

and investigate it as such when it was identified by the victim or anyone else as racist: “A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.63 Our civil law of harassment to some extent reflects that concept, but also deliberately moves away from it, in favour of an approach which seeks to integrate the victim’s assessment, with the court’s best understanding of what took place: In deciding whether conduct has the effect referred to [above], each of the following must be taken into account –​ (a) the perception of B; (b) the other circumstances of the case; (c) whether it is reasonable for the conduct to have that effect.64 The reason the law gives some priority to the subjective assessment of complainants is because often they have the best understanding of a perpetrator’s motives: after all, they have seen the aggressor, and how they treated different people. The reason the law holds back from making them the sole determinant of what happened is to protect against the reality that a proportion of complaints is malicious or misconceived. There needs to be some conceptual space to allow for the possibility that the people who make allegations of discrimination might be wrong. Second, while the law of harassment generally protects people from unwanted conduct which has the effect of violating their dignity, one circumstance in which the courts only rarely intervene is where there is a political conflict, and each side has robustly criticised the other. At that point, the prohibition of harassment and the principle of free speech interact, and the consideration of the latter takes on greater weight.This explains the decision, for example, in Fraser v UCU, a 2013 case concerning a Jewish lecturer who argued that his trade union had harassed him by passing motions critical of Israel and calling for the boycott65 of Israeli institutions, and by inviting Bongani Masuku, International Relations Secretary of COSATU to speak at its events, a trade unionist who had written on his own blog of the need to make “every Zionist ... drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.66 Fraser lost in part because the Tribunal saw him as a “campaigner” who “chooses to engage in the politics of the union in support of Israel” and a participant in contested events: When a rugby player takes the field, he must accept his fair share of minor injuries. Similarly, a political activist accepts the risk of being offended or hurt on occasions by things said or done by his opponents (who themselves take on a corresponding risk). These activities are not for everyone.67 Third, harassment is outlawed only in particular contexts. So, it is most often litigated in an employment case, with a worker bringing a claim to the Employment Tribunal. The county court can hear complaints of harassment (or other breaches

28  The uniqueness of antisemitism

of the Equality Act 2010) arising in the provision of services and public functions, premises, education, and associations (including political parties).68 The protection against discrimination is intended to apply to political parties in relation to their members and protects them from discrimination,69 including harassment. The prohibition against harassment, however, does not give members of the public a right to sue for statements published to the public at large in the press or online.70 The approach of this book is influenced by the work of the historians and sociologists David Feldman, Brendan McGeever, and Ben Gidley, who write that we should see antisemitism as “a deep reservoir of stereotypes and narratives, one which is replenished over time and from which people can draw with ease”.71 The point about wells is that anyone can, and indeed must, drink from them –​no matter their ethnicity, or how they perceive their politics or commitment to anti-​racism. It follows that wherever you locate yourself on the political spectrum, antisemitism is always closer at hand than you think. That said, the metaphor requires one refinement. Feldman and his fellow contributors assumed that the well is always equally deep. I disagree; one theme of this book is that the supply of antisemitic stories and stereotypes can at times be relatively full or relatively empty –​at a global level, this book argues, it was refilled in 2016. Part of the reason why so few people come out well from Labour’s antisemitism crisis is that we were dealing with the revival a form of racism in relation to which many people had forgotten how to act.

Notes 1 For an attempt to show that anti-​black racism, though differently constituted to anti-​ Jewish racism, is in a dialectical pair with it, see H. White, ‘How Is Capitalism Racial? Fanon, Critical Theory and the Fetish of Antiblackness,’ Social Dynamics 46/​1 (2020), pp. 22–​35. 2 Philip Alexander argues that behind medieval religious antisemitism lay three fundamental axioms: (1) Jews as a people/​g roup/​culture/​civilisation are inferior to whatever is seen as the antisemite’s cherished people/​g roup/​culture/​civilisation. (2) Jews are attempting to foist their culture/​civilisation on the antisemite’s people/​g roup, to dominate them for their own advantage. (3) The group or even individual members of the group under Jewish “attack” has the right, and indeed the obligation, to defend themselves. One of the advantages of this approach is that it brings out the commonality between old antisemitic ideas, and their contemporary, albeit secular and political forms. P. Alexander, ‘The Origins of Religious and Racial Antisemitism and the Jewish Response,’ in D. Englander (ed), Jewish Enigma: An Enduring People (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1992), pp. 169–​196. 3 J. Judaken, ‘Rethinking Antisemitism,’ American Historical Review 123/​ 4 (2018), pp. 1122–​1138. 4 E. McCann, ‘The Protestant Working Class,’ Socialist Worker Review 89 (1986), pp. 19–​21. 5 D. Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London: Pluto Press, 2019; Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket, 2019), pp. 221–​224. 6 For those among US paleoconservatives who were trying to promote antisemitism in the 1980s and 1990s, and the difficulties they faced, J. Ganz, ‘The Year the Clock Broke,’ Baffler, November 2018. 7 M. Postone, Antisemitism and National Socialism (London: Chronos, 2000).

The uniqueness of antisemitism  29

8 As Errol Lawrence observes, there were also versions of racist myth, which would distinguish even with British black and British Asian communities, treating (e.g.) people of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin as poor urban sub-​class, illiterate, and fettered by rural customs, while assuming that British Sikhs or Hindus were utterly different. E. Lawrence, ‘ “In the Abundance of Water the Fool Is Thirsty”: Sociology and Black “Pathology”,’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 95–​142, 118–​119. 9 So, in J. H. Taylor, The Half-​Way Generation: A Study of Asian Youths in Newcastle upon Tyne (Windsor: NFER, 1976), there is a repeated insistence on the affluent and respectable character of Asian migration to North East England, the author concluding, “There are … Jewish parallels throughout this study” (p. 243). For the recurring tendency of colonialism to identify and favour perceived model minorities, S. Englert, ‘Recentring the State: A Response to Barnaby Raine on Antisemitism,’ Salvage, 17 December 2019. 10 R. Bunce and P. Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 11 A. Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movement (London: Pluto, 2013). 12 A. Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (London:Verso, 2014). 13 Renton, The New Authoritarians, pp. 27–​38. 14 R. Kabbani, Letter to Christendom (London:Virago, 1989), p. 11; R.Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and “The Satanic Verses” (Southwold: Orwell Press, 1990), p. 44. 15 Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming, pp. 41–​44; A. Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), pp. 138–​150; P. Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-​Bolshevism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018). 16 Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism (Chicago: JVP, 2017), p. 133. 17 Alexander, ‘The Origins of Religious and Racial Antisemitism.’ 18 Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism, p. 45. 19 E. B. Katz, ‘An Imperial Entanglement: Antisemitism,’ American Historical Review 123/​ 4 (2018), pp. 1190–​1209; H. Dabashi, On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), p. 127. 20 M. Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst (London: Saqi, 2009), p. 26. 21 A. Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p, 8. 22 ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ IHRA, May 2016. 23 J. Neuberger, Antisemitism.What It Is.What It Isn’t.Why It Matters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), p. 38. 24 D. Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 136–​140. 25 A. Lissoni, ‘Apartheid’s “Little Israel”: Bophuthatswana’s Not-​So-​Secret Ties with Israel,’ in J. Soske and S. Jacobs, Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), pp. 53–​66. 26 A. Shilon, ‘Why Israel Supported South Africa’s Apartheid Regime,’ Haartez, 11 December 2013. 27 V. Brittain, ‘UN Conference Loses Its Bite, but Not Its Bark,’ Guardian, 29 August 2001; K. S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict:The Israel/​Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: New Jewish Press, 2020), p. 78. 28 Stern, The Conflict, p. 79. 29 Human Rights Voices, ‘Eye on the UN,’ 2001. 30 A. Clarno, ‘Neoliberal Apartheid,’ in Soske and Jacobs, Apartheid Israel, pp. 67–​72, 67. 31 Human Rights Voices, ‘Eye on the UN’; C. McGreal, ‘I am a Jew, Robinson Tells Racism Protesters,’ Guardian, 31 August 2001; C. Schindler, Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimisation (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

30  The uniqueness of antisemitism

32 B.-​H. Lévy, Left in Dark Tines: A Stand against the New Barbarism (New York: Random, House, 2008), p. 137. 33 ‘Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern,’ United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Hearing, 7 November 2017. 34 ‘Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern.’ 35 Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict, pp. 118, 151. 36 Stern, The Conflict, p. 171. 37 ‘Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern.’ The survivor referenced by Stern was Marika Sherwood, a former professor at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. The Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev complained to Manchester University who required Sherwood to change the title of her talk. B. Welch, ‘Manchester University Censors Title of Holocaust Survivor’s Speech on Israel,’ Jewish Chronicle, 29 September 2017. 38 ‘CAA Exposes Lecturer as Author of Sickening Holocaust Article but University of Bristol Defends “Academic Freedom”,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 20 February 2017. 39 ‘Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern.’ 40 ‘Adoption of the Working Definition,’ American Jewish Committee (AJC.org). Accessed 10 December 2020. 41 B. Klug, Offence:The Jewish Case (London: Seagull, 2009), pp. 2, 17, 22. 42 ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ IHRA, May 2016. 43 As in section 26, Equality Act 2010, where harassment is defined as something which creates an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for its victims. Or the definition proposed by Brian Klug “a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are”. B. Klug, ‘The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Antisemitism,’ Patterns of Prejudice 37 (2003), pp. 117–​138. 44 ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ IHRA, May 2016. 45 Arnold Foster and Benjamin Epstein begin their book, The New Antisemitism (New York: McGraw Hill Books, 1974) with the Six Day War: The earliest signs that Israel was destined to be a major target of Radical Left hostility occurred during the 1967 Six-​Day War when the left at home, especially the Communist Party, echoed the attacks on Israel that were being levelled in the United Nations. (p. 11) Other voices warning of a new antisemitism include R. W. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991); P.Taguieff and P. Camiller, Rising from the Muck: The New Antisemitism in Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004); P. Chesler, The New Antisemitism:The Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It (San Francisco: Jossey-​ Bass, 2003); and D. Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2017). There are differences between these accounts:Taguieff associates antisemitism principally with Muslims, Hirsh is concerned with only the secular left. But all these writers share the idea that contemporary antisemitism expresses itself principally in attacks on Israel. 46 A. Lerman, ‘Undefined,’ Nation, 9 June 2010; S. Sedley, ‘Defining Antisemitism,’ London Review of Books, 4 May 2017. 47 ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ IHRA, May 2016. 48 Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to Our Movement (New York: JFREJ, 2017), p. 17. 49 ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism,’ IHRA, May 2016. 50 A. Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 244–​246; M. Palumbo, The History of the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), pp. 83–​100.

The uniqueness of antisemitism  31

51 For a critique of this proposition, S. Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London:Verso, 2009). 52 D. Renton, ‘An Insidious Dialectic: Antisemitism, Corbyn, and the Fight for the Labour Party,’ Tempest, 13 November 2020. 53 ‘Afterword: Israel and White-​Settler Societies,’ in G. Lewis, ‘A Racist Endeavor: Zionist Israel’s Black Jewish Victims of Color,’ Monthly Review Online, 4 December 2020. 54 Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism, p. x. 55 ‘Palestinian Rights and the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,’ Guardian, 29 November 2020. 56 G. Robertson,‘IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Is Not Fit for Purpose,’ Doughty Street Chambers, 31 August 2018; H.Tomlinson, ‘Counsel’s Opinion on the IHRA Definition,’ Free Speech on Israel, 8 March 2017; A. Lerman, ‘Labour Should Ditch the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Altogether,’ Open Democracy, 4 September 2018; Sedley, ‘Defining Antisemitism’; D. Feldman, ‘The Government Should Not Impose a Faulty Definition of Antisemitism on Universities,’ Guardian, 2 December 2020. 57 S. Oryszczuk, ‘Is “Antisemitism” No Longer Fit for Purpose?’ Jewish News, 16 November 2020. 58 Section 28, Crime and Disorder Act 1998. 59 Section 13, Equality Act 2010. 60 Section 19, Equality Act 2010. 61 Section 26, Equality Act 2010. 62 Section 27, Equality Act 2010. 63 K. Kahn-​Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity (London: Repeater, 2019), p. 152;The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Cm 4262–​I, para 45.17. 64 Section 26, Equality Act 2010. 65 For the history of this tactic, A. R.Takriti, ‘Before BDS: Lineages of Boycott in Palestine,’ Radical History Review 134 (2019), pp. 58–​95. 66 I. Chernick, ‘High Profile Hate Speech Case Heard in South Africa’s Constitutional Court,’ Jerusalem Post, 28 August 2019. 67 Fraser v University & Colleges Union, ET Case No: 2203290/​2011, para 156. 68 Parts 3, 4, 6, and 7 Equality Act 2010. 69 So, for example, section 104 Equality Act 2010 permits positive action to select candidates to reduce inequality in the party’s representation (for example, to allow for processes such as all-​women shortlists). 70 Sube & Anor v News Group Newspapers Ltd & Anor [2018] EWHC 1234, paras 82–​84. 71 B. Gidley, B. McGeever, and D. Feldman, ‘Labour and Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood,’ Political Quarterly, 10 May 2020.

3 NAZ SHAH AND THE CAUSE OF PALESTINE

When Corbyn first stood to be the leader of the Labour Party, he was criticised by Jewish communal organisations. In August 2015, the Board of Deputies posed seven questions for him to answer, focussing on his past associations with figures such as Paul Eisen, Stephen Sizer, and Raed Salah.1 Alan Johnson of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre wrote a follow-​up piece for the New Statesman, again focussing on Corbyn’s support for Palestine and the presence within the Palestinian cause, Johnson said, of antisemitism.2 Similarly, there were complaints in early 2016 of antisemitism at the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC). Events in Oxford led to a request to Baroness Royall to investigate and report.3 The first six months of Corbyn’s leadership also pointed to the future in a different way. In their history of the Labour Party since 1979, Mark Seddon, the former editor of Tribune, and Francis Beckett, once a youthful spin doctor for Michael Foot, note that after Corbyn had been elected leader there was a short and intense factional war as to which part of the movement the new leader would lean on for advice. The online campaign Jeremy for Leader4 had been transformed into a membership group, Momentum, which provided volunteers, astute young activists, and close friends of Corbyn. It was, however, sidelined by UNITE, without whom Corbyn could not be guaranteed a majority on Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC). So, by a strange and wrenching irony, Corbyn, who had come to the job because something new was stirring in the land, took what must have looked at the time like the safe option, and surrounded himself with the oldest of the old guard.5 We will see through this book how the instincts of UNITE and Momentum were repeatedly different. The former encouraged those who sought to escalate the

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  33

crisis, was ignorant of Jewish sentiment, and blithe at the thought of offending it. Momentum, by contrast, saw the gap emerge between Jewish community institutions and the Labour left and worked hard to address it. In January 2016, Momentum’s founder Jon Lansman was asked to give an interview to the Jewish Chronicle, and readily agreed. Lansman described going to Israel after the 1973 war to stay with relatives. Lansman emphasised his Jewish heritage and described how his pro-​Palestinian stance had come about not from ignorance of the region but from the time he had spent in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz in the Negev and my aunt lived in Beersheva. It was actually a very politicising experience. When I did my barmitzvah I saw myself as a Zionist and I think after I went there, I felt it less. Lansman tried to signal to readers that there was a space for them in Corbyn’s Labour. He presented Labour’s views as a quest for peace: Jeremy supports the existence of Israel ... Why should Israel supporters not have a place in Labour? Of course, they should. I’ve been arguing for two states long before it was acceptable within the Jewish community to argue for two states.6 In November 2015, a survey of British Jews commissioned by the pro-​Israel and pro-​peace campaign Yachad had found that 90 percent of those interviewed supported the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. This was plainly a huge majority. But there was almost equal majorities opposed to the acts which Israel does as a Jewish state to expand the occupation and make life unbearable for Palestinians. Some 68 percent of British Jews said they had a “sense of despair” whenever new expansion is approved, while 73 percent believed Israel’s approach to peace was damaging its standing in the world. Around 75 percent of British Jews agreed that “the expansion of settlements on the West Bank is a major obstacle to peace”.7 Jon Lansman had read that survey. His father Bernard had been a Conservative councillor in Hackney, as Lansman explained to the Jewish Chronicle, but a conciliatory figure. On his death, he was so well-​respected that he was lauded by Labour opponents as well as Tory colleagues. Lansman senior had been a dove in Israeli terms, and the founder of Momentum hoped that if the Labour left was able to combine political support for Palestine liberation with emotional intelligence and respect for Jewish opinion, Jewish organisations would reciprocate. Middle of the road Jewish opinion, he argues, “whilst certainly pro-​Israel, was critical of Israeli government policies, settlement expansion and wanted peace not on-​going occupation”.8 Until spring 2016, Corbyn still enjoyed the mandate of his clear victory in the leadership campaign. Jewish organisations were testing out his leadership and wondering how far to take their opposition. Corbyn was able to survive each of

34  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

these early skirmishes relatively unharmed. That moment of relative calm ended with the Shah and Livingstone affairs. The first sustained attempt to accuse Jeremy Corbyn or the Corbyn-​led Labour Party of antisemitism began in April 2016, at which time he had been leader for seven months. A relative albeit fragile truce was then in place between the different Labour Party factions.9 Luciana Berger (a key figure in later events) was still in the Shadow Cabinet where she was serving without dissent as Corbyn’s shadow minister for Mental Health. The right-​wing Guido Fawkes blog, run by Paul Staines, a Thatcherite, and Brexiteer Conservative,10 broke the story that Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West and Parliamentary Private Secretary to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, had posted two Facebook posts which, Fawkes maintained, were antisemitic.The first from August 2014, or around nine months before Shah was elected to Parliament, reproduced a picture of Israel superimposed over the United States, suggesting that the clash between Israel and Palestine could be solved if only the Jewish population of the former chose to relocate to the latter country: “Problem solved and save you bank charges for the £3bn you transfer yearly”. Considering what was happen to the Labour Party, it is almost painful to read the way in which Shah’s friends tried to school her on the politics of international justice. “A more realistic solution”, a Dr Mahmood Shah wrote, “might be [a]‌one state solution where Muslims [and] Jews live [in an] equal [and] and democratic state. Similar to South African solution”.11 In Shah’s second Facebook post, she urged her followers to vote in an online poll asking whether Israel had committed war crimes. Shah was criticised. Corbyn agreed, calling Shah’s posts “offensive and unacceptable”.12 Shah was suspended by the Labour Party while the NEC investigated her. Further posts emerged, including that, when her poll had resulted in a large vote against treating Israeli action as criminal, Shah urged her followers to vote the other way, “Urgent Action ... will take ten seconds”, writing, “The Jews are rallying to the poll”.13 Naz Shah was attacked first by Guido Fawkes, then in the mainstream press. Next, Corbyn himself was condemned by David Cameron during Prime Minister’s Questions. In addition, Labour failed to come up with a collective response which was capable of containing the crisis. Corbyn apologised.Then in a second statement he called her language “antisemitic”. Only belatedly did the party agreed to suspend and investigate her.

Shah and the cause of Palestinian freedom One of the ways in which Naz Shah stands out from the other incidents discussed in this book is that she was criticised for comments which had been made in support of Palestinian rights. Why has Palestine become such an issue for the left? The Palestinians comprise (1) nearly two million Arabs living within the pre-​1967 borders of Israel, or a little more than one in five of the Israeli population, where their average income is around a third lower than that of Jewish Israelis,14 and

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  35

they are more than twice as likely to have an income below the state poverty line.15 They suffer discrimination in employment and housing, for example, through rules offering employment only to those who have served in the Israeli army. Arab employment in the civil servant stands at just 11 percent or around half of what it should be, were it not for employment barriers.16 In theory, those living within the pre-​1967 borders are permitted to vote in Israeli elections, and they elect members to the Knesset, enabling Israel to present itself to the world as a normal democracy. However, Arab deputies are stigmatised, denounced by government ministers and subject to laws enabling other deputies to revoke their election at any time.17 According to the Knesset’s Rules of Procedures, the Presidium “shall not approve a bill that in its opinion denies the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish People”. On the basis of those rules, between 2011 and 2019, four bills related to Palestinians’ rights, including their right to participate in public life, were disqualified even before reaching discussion in that parliament.18 Next, there are (2) around 400,000 Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem which was annexed in 1967. They do not have Israeli citizenship but enjoy only a limited right to reside which can be taken away at any time (e.g., if they marry a non-​resident). Their situation is broadly similar to those of Israeli Arab citizens; however, in several respects it is inferior even to them. Mere residents are not permitted to vote in Israeli elections. People with residents’ rather than citizens’ passes find it harder to obtain medical insurance or social security. Laws prevent building in East Jerusalem and encourage the demolition of Palestinian homes there, which the state does repeatedly, with 265 homes pulled down in 2019 alone.19 Then there are (3) some four and a half million Palestinians living in occupied West Bank or Gaza. There, average wages are lower than among Arab Israelis, at roughly a half (the West Bank) or a quarter (Gaza) of what they are in Israel.20 The Gaza Strip, in particular, is often compared to a single, huge, refugee camp. It holds 1.8 million people or 12 percent of the total population of Israel, Jerusalem, and the Occupied Territories, on just two percent of the land.21 In spring 2020, the official unemployment in Gaza stood at 45 percent.22 A small number of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (around 100,000 people) are employed in Israel or on settlements.23 There they suffer even worse discrimination than those living within Israel’s borders. Health and safety protections are minimal, workers are not permitted to switch employers, their work permits are routinely cancelled, and wages go repeatedly unpaid.24 Although Palestinian literacy rates are among the highest in the world,25 educational infrastructure is crumbling.26 Meanwhile, in autumn 2020, as Covid struck the country, health officials were warning of a lack of ventilators, personal protective equipment, and medicine.27 Almost 80 percent of the aquifer of both Israel and the Occupied Territories is located under the West Bank;28 this remains under the control of Israel, despite Israel’s apparent willingness to grant Palestinian’s administrative authority over the land above. The consequences include that, in Gaza, fewer than one in ten

36  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

households have access to fresh water.29 Access to electricity is also interrupted.The roads which join Palestinian towns are broken, every few hundred metres, with checkpoints, many of them created by Israel’s 400-​mile-​long separation wall, more than four-​fifths of which meanders inside the Green Line (the supposed border with Israel).30 Meanwhile, repeated incursions from Israeli troops, including by helicopter,31 bulldozer raids, and night-​time bombings, cause even during times of apparent peace repeated civilian deaths. One in five citizens in the Occupied Territories has been imprisoned without trial.32 Two hundred citizens from West Bank and Gaza were killed in 2019, according to the UN, while eight Israeli civilians also died.33 Between 2018 and 2020, night-​time raids on the Occupied Territories were taking place at the rate of 250 per month. No warrants were required to justify these raids. They left their victims feeling unsafe in their own homes and beds.34 Palestinian residents of the West Bank or Gaza are not citizens of Israel, have no right to travel there unless (exceptionally) for work, and have no rights or legal status within that country. By law even a Palestinian married to an Israeli is prohibited from being a citizen of Israel or residing there. As Prime Minister Sharon explained, when the law was introduced, “There is no need to hide behind security arrangements. There is a need for the existence of a Jewish state”.35 The West Bank and Gaza are not contiguous; it is a matter of extreme difficulty to travel from one part of the Occupied Territories to the other. Citizens of the Occupied Territories are not citizens of Israel, are permitted only to vote in elections for the Palestinian Authority, which has no effective control over most of the matters which normally constitute statehood: people, goods, food, medicines, and even water enter only by Israeli consent, which is repeatedly withdrawn. The fourth and final element of the Palestinian population are (4) the refugees of Israel’s wars, who live in exile (many in cramped conditions in refugee camps),36 and their descendants. Some 4 million Palestinian refugees, including the survivors of the 800,00037 displaced in the 1948 Arab-​Israel War, and their families, are registered for humanitarian assistance with the United Nations.38 Members of this group are excluded from Israel citizenship and prevented from returning to Israel.39 Their homes and lands were part of historical Palestine and are now occupied by Israel. Palestinian refugees are left to travel a landscape of memory: stories of the homes that were taken, of the people who were dispersed. “Our dead are still in the cemeteries of others”, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti laments, “our living are clinging to foreign borders”.40 “Every day spent away from Palestine, in the life of a Palestinian refugee”, writes Basma Ghalayini, “is one day that they believe brings them a day closer to their return”.41 When thinking of these refugees, it should be recalled that Israeli attacks on other countries in the region have destroyed some of the few places where Palestinians were allowed to live in relative peace, notably Beirut which prior to Israeli’s 1982 invasion and the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps had been “the birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who knew no other cradle ... an island upon which Arab immigrants dreaming of a new world landed”.42

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  37

For all Palestinians, occupation is a constant and ongoing process: It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to market, the emergency hospital, the beach, the bedroom, or a distant capital.43 None of these Palestinian groups has the same citizenship rights in Israel as the country’s seven million Jewish citizens44 –​nor indeed the same citizenship rights as Jews living in Britain, France, or the United States. Rather, a panoply of direct and indirect discriminatory laws make them second-​class citizens or permanent exiles.45

Where Israel comes from When those who side with Israel against the Palestinians justify their position, they very often portray Israel as being in a neat and simple way the product of Nazi German hostility and nothing else. Thus, David Hirsh describes the experience of visiting the Jewish museum in Prague and seeing an exhibition showing images of children taken to be killed in Auschwitz. He writes, “Israel is the dream of children who were never going to have a chance of finding asylum there”.46 This is an incredibly powerful image. He is writing of children who were about to die, and how they place their hopes in a world which had not been born. If you can think of what he is saying and not be moved by it, then the fault is with you –​not him. But it is not the full picture; it is not even half the picture. For if we concentrate only on the story of Israel and Palestine, the Jewish history of that country cannot be reduced to simply the child refugees desperate to leave Europe in 1939.They are a real part of the story; they are not most Israeli Jews. Through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, there was always a Jewish presence within today’s Israel, albeit it was for many centuries a marginal one. Jews lived in towns including Safed, Tiberius, and Hebron, as well as in Jerusalem.47 As recently as 1917, the population of Palestine comprised 60,000 Jews and nearly 700,000 Arabs.48 The Jewish history of migration to the Middle East began in the nineteenth century with modern Zionism. It was not the first attempt to organise the migration of Jews to Palestine; it was, however, the first to set itself the objective of creating a Jewish state, with flags and uniforms and banknotes,49 and sovereign over both Jews and Arabs.50 Zionism was an alliance of state builders, idealistic socialists, and advocates of the racial subordination of Arabs, with its participants often playing more than one of these parts at once.51 For example, David Ben-​ Gurion, later the first prime minister of Israel, was in 1921 the leader of the Labour-​ Zionist movement in Palestine and secretary of the Jewish trade union federation, the Histadrut. As such, he espoused what sounded like a vision of working-​class power –​with both Jewish and Arab workers organised into unions and with labour running the new society.Yet Ben-​Gurion, even at his radical height, did not believe

38  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

that Arabs were entitled to rule their own lives,52 rather that,“conscious and cultured Jewish worker[s]‌” were required to “educate the Arab worker to live and orderly and cooperative life”. Under his leadership, the Histadrut navigated between social justice and racial exclusion.Where possible, it sought the exclusion of Arab workers from their workplaces. Where ethnic hegemony was unachievable, the Histadrut reluctantly agreed to organise Arab workers. For Zachary Lockman, the historian of Jewish and Arab labour relations, a key exchange took place at the 1927 third congress of the Histadrut when Ben-​Gurion was confronted by Ahmad Hamdi, who had brought 600 Arab workers into the Histadrut. “Let no East and West, Zionism and Arabism, Torah and Qu’ran, cause divisions among us”, Hamdi argued. Ben-​ Gurion answered him scornfully. “Had it not been for Zionists”, he replied, [T]‌here would not be 30,000 organised workers in Palestine, nor the Histadrut, nor the movement which will raise the [Arab] worker from his degradation ... This is Zionism: the return of the Jewish masses to Eretz Yisra’el and their transformation into a productive workforce on which the country’s future regime will be based.53 The founders of Israel pursued their visions against the opposition of the majority of the world’s Jews who up until 1939 preferred to remain in Europe or North Africa, rather than travel to Palestine. When Jews left Europe, which three million did between 1881 and 1939, they chose the United States over Palestine, by a ratio of six to one.54 The Jews of interwar Eastern Europe, who lived in their millions in the “Yiddishland” of Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania, form a part of the Zionist story of Jewish history only in so far as they were doomed to be murdered in the Holocaust.55 Their language was Yiddish; the language of Israel is Hebrew. “The Jewish working class of Eastern Europe has disappeared”, write Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg, “swallowed up by this history and this disappearance is now duplicated in historical consciousness”.56 A similar process of historical disappearance has occurred to the Mizrahi Jews, who lived in huge numbers in Iraq and Egypt, in Libya,Tunisia,Algeria, and Morocco. After 1948, 800,000 Jews left these countries for Israel. Although they are a majority of the Israeli population, they, too, chafe against the Israeli story. They did not face genocide in these countries, which played no part in the Holocaust.The narrative on which Israel depends is the idea that the rest of the world has shown Jews a constant and unremitting hostility. This is just about arguable when looking at the history of Europe; it makes no sense of the 2,600-​year-​long story of Jews in Iraq.57 Zionism was not the inevitable next step in Jewish history, but (amongst other things) a determined rejection of the majority of the world’s Jews who were characterised as weak and bookish and in need of replacement by a new kind of Jew. At the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, the organiser of the event Max Nordau told his audience that “The majority of the Jews are a race of accursed beggars”.58 To Haim Brenner, who migrated from London to Palestine in 1909 and became one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew literature, the Jews of

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  39

Eastern Europe were “gypsies and filthy dogs”. For the novelist and Zionist Micha Josef Berdyczewski, the Jews were “not a nation, not a people, not human”.59 Such politics promised that the Jews of Israel would not be oppressed but victorious.60 Jews would be “redeemed” in Israel, “revived”,61 made productive, and capable of changing defeat into conquest.62 The existence of a state in Israel destabilises all sorts of Jewish opinions: not merely such obvious cases as the left-​wing Bundist, Communist,63 and anarchist Jewish traditions, or those currents of Haredi opinion which denounce the secular and non-​messianic character of the Israeli state, but also middling Jewish opinions. It leaves in tatters the Jewish self-​identity of Sigmund Freud, who was capable as late as 1930 of imagining a dialogue with a Zionist acquaintance, in which the latter charged him with neglecting the Jewish religion and the Hebrew language, “Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left of you Jewish?” To which Freud answered, “A great deal and possibly its essence”.64 The victory of Israel in 1948 and the persistence of that state also damage the tradition within Reform Judaism of seeing Jews as a religious community in need of renewal and not a nation. According to Reform beliefs, in the words of Shlomo Sand, “Each Jew had only one homeland; the country where he or she lived”.65 Even Orthodoxy has been altered by a state which is neither utopian, nor messianic, and contradicts the previous insistence on waiting and not forcing redemption. So, when Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the leader of Orthodox Judaism in nineteenth-​century Germany, encountered the first stirrings of what would become Zionism, he responded with horror, reminding his readers that what they shared was not a land but a religious tradition: “Yisrael was given the Torah in the wilderness, and there –​without a country and a land of its own –​it became a nation, a body whose soul was Torah”.66 The narrative that all Jewish suffering ends in Israel is a story which takes a thread of Jewish history and makes it the whole. Even if all Jewish roads led to Jerusalem, the reality would remain that there is a second half to the story: the Palestinians who were forced into a new status as subordinate citizens or exiles after 1948. For the creation of Israel out of Palestine saw the making of new generations of refugees sitting, in the words of the novelist Ghassan Kanfani, “on the pavement, waiting for a new Fate”.67 They and their descendants still do not possess a home in which they can live as equal citizens. They remain excluded by stories of the conflict which prioritise Jewish suffering and redemption and fail to integrate the Palestinian experience of dispossession.68

Supporting Palestinians –​through indifference to Jews The preface to this book warned against an attitude that was blithe to what most British Jews thought, and which treated them as inevitably opposed to the left –​ either over domestic politics or over Israel. It suggested that the people who held to that approach were at risk of creating an environment in which antisemitism could flourish. When people who hold those views are challenged, they often employ a

40  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

“Palestinian” defence, saying something like:“I did not mean to deny the Holocaust, blame Jews for the slave trade, portray them as outsiders in the Labour Party, etc., all I meant to do was support Palestinians against Israel”. There are several reasons to query that defence. One is that very little of the Labour crisis was directly about Israel or Palestine. Apart from Shah, much more of it was criticism of Jews as Jews. People who had used annoying or antisemitic language were looking for a justification for that language. They were using the occupation as a shield for behaviour unconnected to Palestine. What though of comments, such as Shah’s, which were made in support of Palestine? Corbyn’s critics often argued that a clear majority of Jewish people in Britain supported Israel and sought to use this reality to silence anyone, for example, the occupation of Gaza to conditions in apartheid South Africa or speaking, as Shah had, of Israeli actions as war crime. There were two inept ways in which Corbyn supporters responded. In the first, groups such as JVL69 or websites such as Vox Political70 would insist that Jewish bodies such as the Board of Deputies were unelected and illegitimate and imply that if only their opinion was properly examined it would become clear that most British Jews were in fact already opposed to Zionism. In the second (which we will encounter at several points in this book), socialists would accept that British Jewish opinion was pro-​Zionist and seek to explain this fact by sociological theories (that Jews are all rich, or middle-​ class, or somehow doomed by history to be the servants of imperialism). Such theories say little about Jews and more about their speakers. The problem with the first of these approaches is that when left-​ wingers (most of whom were not Jews) were seen to lecture Jewish people on how Jewish institutions worked, they were unlikely to persuade anyone watching. To take the Board of Deputies: it may be unelected, but it is not unrepresentative of the population it serves. Most of the several hundred deputies are nominated by synagogues and charities, and a range of views have long been contained within it. At times when Jewish opinion has been changing, the Deputies followed it. In the 1940s, for example, Deputies included the Bundist radicals of the Workers’ Circle and fellow travellers of the Communist Party of Great Britain.71 For many years prior to 1945, the Board was fiercely anti-​Zionist, while its switch to its recent unremitting support for Israel reflected the huge swing in Jewish opinion (both in Britain and worldwide) towards Zionism after 1945. This problem with the second approach is that the people who argued for it saw some of the dynamics by which pro-​Israeli politics appeals to wider Jewish sentiment, but only a part of them. For when a right-​wing politician in Israel authorises (say) the destruction of Palestinian homes, that politician does indeed say to the people of Israel that this act is being done for them. A similar approach is then made to Jews in America and Britain and elsewhere, who are treated as instruments, and expected to join in endorsing Israeli’s action.72 Yet what many of these British defenders of Palestine rights seemed not to grasp is that the wider the net of communal support is thrown, the larger is the proportion of Jewish people who dissent from Israel’s actions.

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  41

This chapter has already referred to the survey carried out in 2015 by the campaign Yachad, which showed Jewish majorities both for Israel and for a de-​ escalation of Israeli policy.73 There have been further signs since of the latter opinion reasserting itself. In December 2020, the Union of Jewish Students (which has long supported Israel), passed a resolution committing the union to recognising “the collective right of the Palestinian people to self-​determination”, a right which was described as “inalienable”.74 That did not mean that the union had given up on Israel, rather, it was committing itself to a “two state” future for Israel and Palestine. But what it did show was that Jewish opinion on the issue was sharply divided along generational lines, and that there was a significant dovish contingent –​if only Labour had found a way to address it. Over the years, many Palestinians have grasped the unevenness of Jewish communal mobilisation (both in Israel and abroad) and sought to turn it against the occupation. This, for example, is Edward Said, writing in 1997, after the Oslo process had run aground: We need to remind ourselves that political struggles are always contests of will, in which one side attempts to persuade the other side to give up, to lose the will to resist and fight on. This is not a military but a political and moral matter.75 Said’s understanding the moral dimension of Palestinian politics equipped him to resist the idea that Jews –​in Britain or in the United States –​should be seen as a single group of people, motivated by a shared hostility to Palestinian rights. From this perspective Jewish moral sense is a force capable of contributing to the redemption of Palestine.76 Accordingly, Said was attentive to Jewish criticisms of Israel and repeatedly sought to raise their profile, noting in 1998 that: What Azmi Bishara77 and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pappé are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by which Jews and those Palestinians already inside the Jewish state have the same rights.78 Such a politics could then be extended to the Occupied Territories: where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side, together, but with only one people, Israeli Jews, now dominating the other. So, the choice is either apartheid or justice and citizenship.79 This strategic perspective had, in turn, implications for how Palestinians should see Jews and the history of Jewish suffering: We must recognise the realities of the Holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged.80

42  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

Said was an exiled Palestinian, who had been forced to leave the country in 1948 aged just 13. He campaigned for the right of Palestinian refugees to return, even during the Oslo peace process in which the Palestinian Authority was willing to trade away their claim to citizenship. He belonged to the irreconcilable wing of his generation. If even a figure who had suffered a lifetime of exile at Israeli hands was capable of grasping that “the Jews” were not a single bloc of people but divided by class, generation, and opinion, and worth courting, then there is no excuse for British activists to pretend that an attitude of causing gratuitous offence is somehow “pro-​Palestinian”.

Israel and Shah The purpose of setting out the above history is to show that solidarity with Palestinians is a legitimate cause, which is most often informed by empathy with the victims of dispossession and whose politics are to a greater extent informed by a desire for justice than a desire to harm Jews. Also, because Israel portrays itself as a Jewish state, there is always the danger that criticisms of it may end up falling into criticisms not of its politicians, its arms manufacturers, or propagandists, but of its ordinary people. Moreover, because its leaders present Israel as the expression of the suffering that culminated in the Holocaust, and because many Jewish people in the West share that assessment of its origins, they are likely to be especially attentive of any criticism that attacks Israel not for what it does but for who lives there. Shah’s belief that Israel has committed war crimes is not unusual. Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines these crimes as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. It includes wilful killing; torture or inhuman treatment; wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health; extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power; wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement; and taking of hostages.81 Let us now take just one of these: extensive destruction and appropriation of property. It has long been the practice of Israeli troops, on making incursions into Palestinian territories, to destroy the homes of suspects, and the homes of members of their families, and of people in any way associated with them.The Rome Statute provides defence to allegations of war crimes, which is that such destruction is permitted to the extent that it is a military necessity. Plainly, every time that Israel troops cross into the Occupied Territories and destroy a Palestinian home an allegation of war crimes can be made; and, equally plainly, spokespersons for the Israeli Defence Force are capable of insisting on the need for their incursion.Those who tell themselves that “The IDF is the most moral army in the world”82 no doubt believe

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  43

what they are told. Meanwhile such independent NGOs as Amnesty International have done their best to piece through the allegations and counter-​allegations.Their belief is that this conduct does indeed satisfy the definition of war crimes.83 If you want to look for war crimes in Israeli history, then the clearest cases are not to be found in the last 10 or 20 years, but in the actions that changed what had been in 1947 a majority Arab state to what was by 1948 a majority Jewish one. Such Israeli “new historians” as Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé have shown the part played in the creation of Israel by what they call the “ethnic cleaning” of Palestinians84 including (the key instance for Morris) the massacre of civilians at Deir Yassin, in which around 120 “mostly non-​combatants were murdered” and “there were also cases of mutilation and rape”.85 The mass killings were publicised by Jewish groups who sought to intensify population transfer, with the Irgun exulting in the killings and broadcasting the news of them to other Palestinian villages to force their inhabitants to join the exodus.86 For Pappé, the most significant massacre was carried out in October 1948 at Al-​Dawayima, in which up to 200 people were killed and 450 people left unaccounted for, among them over 170 women and children. The Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death. These were not reports delivered weeks later, but eye-​witness accounts sent to the high Command within a few days of the event.87 Ilan Pappé concludes, “There is no escape from defining the Israeli actions ... as a war crime”.88 That history is widely known in Israel. The county Absentees Property Law 1950 provided that any Palestinian citizen who left her place of residence before 1 September 1948 was deemed to have relinquished any claim to their property. Their land was vested in a Custodianship Council for Absentees’ Property. The Custodian was given power to destroy homes, reallocate citrus groves, vineyards, and plantations. Every right an absentee had was relinquished.89 Without these acts of ethnic dispossession, there would be no settlements, no Jewish state, no Israel. In 1949, the Israeli novelist S. Yizhar published a novella Khirbet Khizeh which fictionalises the ethnic cleaning of Palestinians. One soldier says, “Forget these Arabs –​they not even human”. Another exults in conquest, “Our old-​timers used to break their backs for any strip of land, and today we just walk in and take it!”The protagonists of Khirbet Khizeh kill civilians recklessly. The novel shows the soldiers employing shallow and untrue claims that Arabs were all evil, antisemitic, and cruel, in order to justify to themselves the reality of their own behaviour. “Imagine if he’d been a Jew and we’d been Arabs”, one of them, Aryeh, says,“They’d have slaughtered him just like that”. The protagonist tries to convince himself of the necessity of being “tough” and “harden[ing] his heart”, but finds this task increasingly difficult.

44  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

Finally, he sees an Arab woman walking with a child in her hand. The narrator is struck with the realisation90 that the harm he and his companions had done to Arabs was akin to the harm that had been done to Jews for centuries. “This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like”. He tells his friend Moishe, “This is a filthy war”.91 Like those American films of the Vietnam War which make that conflict a story of American moral defeat and renewal, Yizhar’s novel is not beyond reproach. The few Palestinian characters allowed onto its pages are almost silent. Palestinian critics complain that such narratives result in a new story of Israeli and Jewish victimhood, making the Palestinians (in Edward Said’s bitter phrase) just “another people ... the victims of the victims”.92 Khirbet Khizeh is a novel, not a historical account. Whether it does justice to the events it describes or not, it acknowledges the facts of 1948 and the mindset which was necessary to justify murder. Yizhar’s novel is hardly a hidden resource: since 1964, it has been part of Israel’s high school curriculum. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Israeli pupils have read it.The book was adapted for Israeli television in 1978 and shown again in 1992. It is therefore not hyperbolic –​nor in any way a rejection of Jewish sentiments, or an insult to them –​to think of the removal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that took place in 1948 (and again in 1967), through mass killings, and through the threat of further killings, as war crimes. It is not a rhetorical ploy or a matter of taking sides; rather it is to reflect on those acts, to apply international law definitions to them, and take their meaning seriously. Shah’s image of Israel superimposed over the United States had a certain tenuous relationship to reality: some Jews have left the United States for Israel in the last 40 years and have then joined settlements in that country and have in that way contributed to the consolidation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In the anti-​Zionist imagination, it is often assumed that most or all Israeli were American born, in the same way that it is often wrongly said that that there are more Jews in Manhattan than there are in Israel (when there are in fact around seven million Jews in Israel, which is rather more than three times the Jewish population of New York state).93 The number of Israeli citizens in 2018 who had been born in the United States was only 150,000, or less than one in 40 of the total Jewish population of Israel.94 Shah’s map suggested that all Jews in Israel could be removed and taken to the United States including the 98 percent of Jewish Israelis who had not been born there –​in what could only be a further process of forced removal. As for Shah’s poll, and her attempt to swing it in the direction of a finding that was critical of Israel, plenty of non-​Jewish people identify with Israel including a majority of British and American conservatives, and much of the Labour right. There are many different paths towards an identification with that state. Plenty of British Conservatives or American Republicans are attracted by notions of a Western enclave standing up to Muslims. In the centre ground of politics, you often encounter reactions of guilt at the memory of the Holocaust, or feelings that Israelis

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  45

are people “like us”: with customs and lifestyles akin to those of middle-​class people in London or New York, and unlike the Palestinian who lives are poor, crowded and just different.95 A poll of this sort could not tell us who voted against the idea of “war crimes” or what their motives were in so voting. In writing, “The Jews are rallying to the poll”,96 Shah was collapsing all these reactions into one. She behaved as if Jewish support for Israel went simply along ethnic lines: that Jews were willing to minimise Israel’s actions, and were motivated simply by a clannish desire to assist other people like them. To be as kind as possible about her, it was ill-​informed and thoughtless behaviour. She could reasonably have expected people to complain about it. After her comments were publicised, Shah had the good sense to acknowledge her mistake.97 She attended a meeting of 130 Jewish people in Leeds at which she promised to make a “real” rather than a “politician’s apology”.98 Her words were welcomed by the Community Security Trust, and there was little desire to push the matter further.99 Moreover, this was the first incident, and there was not yet a “civil war” dynamic on social media,100 with tens of thousands of people doing research of their own, looking to either incriminate or exonerate her. The hope that this was a temporary crisis disappeared soon afterwards, when former mayor of London Ken Livingstone gave an interview purporting to defend Shah. The next chapter describes what Livingstone said and explains why it was so unpopular. It was his intervention, and the thoughtless way in which parts of the left rallied to defend him, which changed a containable crisis into a story which was to drag on for several years.

Notes 1 O. Wright, ‘Labour Leadership Contest: 7 Questions Jeremy Corbyn’s Critics Say He Must Answer,’ Independent, 18 August 2015.The content of these criticisms is discussed in Chapter 13. 2 A. Johnson, ‘No Jeremy Corbyn Is Not an Antisemitic –​but the Left Should Be Wary of Who He Calls His Friends,’ New Statesman, 2 September 2015. 3 This is discussed in Chapter 7. 4 D. Renton, ‘Labour and the Left After #jezwecan: An Interview with Ben Sellers,’ RS21, 15 October 2015. 5 F. Beckett and M. Seddon, Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England (London: Biteback, 2018), p. 224. 6 R. Doherty, ‘Ex-​ kibbutznik Who Is Corbyn’s Left-​ Hand Man,’ Jewish Chronicle, 28 January 2016. 7 S. Miller, The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel (London: City University, 2015). 8 Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 9 For an attempt to spell out the terms of this early truce, D. Renton, ‘How King Jeremy Will Rule, Where His Friends Will Be Found,’ Lives Running, 23 September 2020. 10 A. Perkins, ‘Guido Fawkes: A Cross between a Comic and a Propaganda Machine,’ Guardian, 7 April 2018. 11 ‘Labour MP: Israelis Should Face “Transportation” Out of Middle East,’ Guido Fawkes, 26 April 2016.

46  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

12 J. Elgot, ‘Naz Shah: Timeline of Events Leading to MP’s Suspension from Labour,’ Guardian, 27 April 2016. 13 ‘Naz Shah,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 13 May 2020; Elgot, ‘Naz Shah.’ 14 ‘Wages of Jewish Workers in Israel 35 Percent Higher Than Arab Counterparts,’ Middle East Monitor, 11 December 2019. 15 Inter-​Agency Task Force on Israeli Arab Issues, ‘Israel’s Annual Poverty Report: Decline in Arab Poverty Meets Increase in Depth and Severity,’ 5 February 2019. 16 N. Ahituv, ‘Could Netanyahu Actually Be Good for Israel’s Arabs?’ Haaretz, 31 October 2019. 17 Y. Jabareen, ‘Silencing Arab Members of the Knesset Would Be a New Low for Israeli Democracy,’ Guardian, 1 April 2016. 18 ‘Israel Discriminatory Measures Undermine Palestinian Representation in Knesset,’ Amnesty International, 4 September 2019. 19 J. Magid, ‘2019 Saw Spike in Palestinian Home Demolitions by Israel, Rights Group Finds,’ Times of Israel, 6 November 2020; for justification of previous waves of house demolition; E. Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (London: Arabia, 2010), p. 125; I. Pappé, Ten Myths about Israel (London:Verso, 2016), p. 93. 20 ‘The Working Conditions of Palestinian Wage Earners in Israel,’ Center for Political Economics, February 2017. 21 Pappé, Ten Myths, p. 118. 22 ‘Labour Force Survey Preliminary Results First Quarter January –​March 2020,’ 31 May 2020. 23 Many of which were originally built by Palestinian Labour: “In those days, Israel purchased Gazan lives by the year and in bulk”. R. Al-​Madhoun, The Lady in Tel Aviv (London: Telegram, 2013), p. 9. 24 Kav LaOved, Worker’s Hotline. Accessed 20 August 2020. 25 Around four percent of adult Palestinians, compared to 16 percent in Britain. ‘Literacy Rate of Persons (15 Years and Over) in Palestine by Age Groups and Sex, 1995, 1997, 2000–​2013,’ Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2014; ‘Adult Literacy,’ National Literacy Trust. Accessed 26 October 2020. 26 In 2014, 30 percent of Gaza schools needed rebuilding as a result of that year’s Israeli military attacks. ‘Education,’ United Nations Development Programme (2015). 27 W. Mahmoud, ‘Gaza Declares COVID-​19 Disaster with Health System Near Collapse,’ Al-​Jazeera, 23 November 2020. 28 E. Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London:Verso, 2017), p. 19. 29 G. von Medeazza, ‘Searching for Clean Water in Gaza,’ Unicef, 10 January 2019. 30 ‘The Separation Barrier,’ B’tselem, 11 November 2017. In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, finding that the wall had been illegally built and demanding it be pulled down. The Israeli government ignored that opinion, after which the United Nations established a Register of Damage, to document claims of economic loss suffered by people who were divided from their neighbours, employers, and customers. By November 2020, 72,140 claims for damages had been submitted and more than one million supporting documents collected.‘About UNRoD,’ United Nations Register of Damage. Accessed 30 November 2020. 31 “The helicopter hovering above the refugee camp /​As though it were dusting a field”, A. Shabtai,‘Mice of the World Unite,’ in T. Nitzan and R.T. Back, With an Iron Pen:Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (New York: Excelsior Editions, 2009), p. 19. 32 Pappé, Ten Myths, p. 95.

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  47

33 ‘Data on Casualties,’ United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Accessed 20 August 2020; H. Dabashi, On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), pp. 201–​202. 34 P. Beaumont, ‘Dehumanising: Israeli Groups’Verdict on Military Invasions of Palestinian Homes,’ Guardian, 29 November 2020. 35 A. Abunimah, The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), p. 25; U. Forat, ‘For an Israeli Married to a Palestinian, Family Unification Is Forbidden,’ Haaretz, 1 June 2020. 36 Sahar Khalifeh writes of “Life in the refugee camp, in a tiny room the size of a chicken coop, amid the clamour of people and their secrets”. S. Khalifeh, The End of Spring (Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2008), p. 9. 37 David Gilmour writes that the exact number of refugees was never established. The UN Economic Survey Mission put the total at 726,000; the Refugee Office of the UN Palestine Coalition Commissions placed it at 900,000, and the true figure is probably somewhere in between. D. Gilmour, Dispossessed:The Ordeal of the Palestinians (London: Sphere Books, 1982), p. 74. The Jewish population of Palestine was at that time just 630,000 people. S. Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London:Verso, 2009), p. 281. 38 ‘Palestine Refugees,’ United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. Accessed 1 August 2020. N. Baram, A Land without Borders: My Journey around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Melbourne: Text, 2015), p. 23. 39 Despite UN Resolution 194 of 1948 which insisted that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to return at the earliest practicable date, and those not wishing to return should be compensated for their loss. 40 M. Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 38. 41 B. Ghalayini, Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba (London: Comma Press, 2019), p. viii. Compare Mike Marqusee, who writes, “The homeland is not an inheritance ... It’s not where you come from /​but where you’re going to. /​It’s a place of arrival and rest”. M. Marqusee, Street Music (London: Clissold Books, 2012), p. 66. 42 M. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. xii; E. Khoubry, Gate of the Sun (London:Vintage, 2006). 43 Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, p. 48. 44 ‘Monthly Bulletin of Statistics,’ October 2019. 45 Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has published a list of more than 60 Israeli laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel or Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. ‘Discriminatory Laws in Israel,’ Adalah, undated. Accessed 26 August 2020. 46 D. Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 78. 47 Pappé, Ten Myths, pp. 4, 24. 48 S. Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (London: Verso, 2012), p. 169. 49 A. Oz, Judas (London:Vintage, 2016), p. 165. 50 In Herzl’s terms, “Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves”. T. Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover, 1988 edn), Chapter 2. 51 Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel, p. 16. 52 For the links between Zionist fantasies about the Arab natives to older British colonial narratives about unoccupied spaces and their less-​than-​human inhabitants, E. W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York:Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 79–​82.

48  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

53 Z. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–​ 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 25, 103. B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–​1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 25; A. Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 16–​22. 54 J. Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 60. 55 Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, p. 247. 56 A. Brossat and S. Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (London:Verso, 2017), p. 2. 57 R. Shabi, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2009), p. 3. 58 ‘Address by Max Nordau at the First Zionist Congress, 29 August 1897,’ Jewish Virtual Library;A. Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 59 B. M. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stone: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), p. 17. 60 Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism (Chicago: JVP, 2017), pp. 76–​77. 61 Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, p. 224. 62 S. Englert,‘Recentring the State: A Response to Barnaby Raine on Antisemitism,’ Salvage, 17 December 2019. 63 Hence in Rami Saari’s poem, ‘Soldiers’: “In the conflicted past /​blue shirts and red flags turned into one fabric /​of lies”. Nitzan and Back, With an Iron Pen, p. 55. 64 E. W. Said, Freud and the Non-​European (London:Verso, 2014), pp. 70–​71. 65 Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel, p. 185; P. Alexander, ‘The Church and the Hermeneutical Challenge of Political Zionism,’ Ex Auditu 39 (2019), pp. 1–​32, 2–​3; Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For, pp. 120–​121. 66 Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel, p. 187. 67 G. Kanfani, Men in the Sun and other Palestinian Stories (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), p. 77. 68 E. Said, ‘The Real Meaning of the Hebron Agreement,’ Guardian, 15 February 1997. 69 K. Saeed, ‘Exposé:Who Are the Board of Deputies of British Jews?’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 21 January 2020. 70 ‘Undemocratic, unrepresentative: but the Board of Deputies is gaslighting Labour into thinking it stands up for British Jews,’ Vox Political, 14 January 2020. 71 Lazar Zaidman papers, University of Sheffield library. 72 Some of the dynamics of this process are analysed in G. Philo and M. Berry, Bad News from Israel (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 236–​237. 73 H. Sherwood, ‘Poll of British Jews Finds Widespread Unease with Israel’s Policies,’ Guardian, 12 November 2015. 74 @UJS_​UK, Twitter, 8 December 2020. 75 E. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (London: Granta, 2000), p. 194. 76 S. Nusseibeh, Once upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (London: Halban, 2009), p. xvii. 77 In 1996 Bishara had been elected to the Knesset. In 1998, he was planning to be the first Arab to stand to be prime minister of Israel. 78 Said, The End, p. 285. 79 Said, The End, p. 285. 80 Said, The End, p. 285. Again in 1992, Said wrote of [T]‌he signal contribution of many Jewish, and even Zionist groups and individuals, inside and outside of Israel, who, through revisionist scholarship, courageous speaking

Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine  49

out for human rights, and active campaigning Israeli militarism, helped to make [growing worldwide support for Palestinian rights] possible. E. W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York:Vintage Books, 1992), p. xiv. 81 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 8. 82 Baram, A Land without Borders, p. 86 83 Amnesty International, Israel and the Occupied Territories –​Under the Rubble: House Demolitions and Destruction of Land and Property (London: Amnesty, 2004). 84 I. Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). 85 In B.Morris,The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,1947–​1949 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 112, the number of deaths was given as 250, in reliance on Israeli and British estimates. Morris gave substantially the same account of the events 20 years later, save that there he reduced the number of casualties to 125. B. Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-​Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 127. 86 Morris, The Birth, p. 113. Edward Said was a 12-​year-​old boy when the massacre took place; he has written of the powerful effect that the reports of such “bloodthirsty and seemingly gratuitous violence” had on him. ‘Deir Yassin Recalled,’ in Said, The End, pp. 156–​159. 87 Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing, pp. 196–​197. Again, Morris’s account has shifted from in 1987 accepting Arab reports of between 500 and 1,000 casualties and providing corroborative accounts given by despairing Israeli soldiers (Morris, The Birth, p. 223), to in 2008 arguing that such accounts were “exaggerated” and that while a massacre had undoubtedly taken place it must have been on a lesser scale than was reported (Morris, 1948, p. 333). 88 Pappé, Ten Myths, p. 63. 89 Absentees’ Property Law, 5710–​1950. 90 Yizhar’s certainty that Palestinian Arabs would be forced into exile can be contrasted to the view recounted by many of the victims of forced removal to whom it did not occur that they were being forced into an indefinite departure. The poet Taha Muhammad Ali, for example, writes, “We did not know /​at the moment of parting /​that it was a parting, /​so where would our weeping /​have come from?”T. Muhammad Ali, So What: New and Selected Poems (London: Bloodaxe Books, 2007), p. 61. 91 S.Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh (London: Granta, 2008), pp. 25, 48, 84, 104, 107. 92 Cited in M. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. xxxiii. Compare Mourid Barghouti’s account of listening to the Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin in in 1993: [He] knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli blood, the blood of every Israeli individual without exception. He knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli tears, and he was able to present Israel as the victim of a crime perpetrated by us. M. Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 177–​178. 93 U. Heilman, ‘7 Things to Know about the Jews of New York for Tuesday’s Primary,’ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 17 June 2018; ‘Israel’s Independence Day 2019,’ Bureau of Statistics, 6 May 2019. 94 Immigrants by period of immigration, Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 16 August 2018. 95 Philo and Berry, Bad News, p. 237. 96 ‘Naz Shah,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 13 May 2020; Elgot, ‘Naz Shah.’

50  Naz Shah and the cause of Palestine

97 One website Buzzfeed initially reported and then retracted a story that Shah’s apology had been heavily edited by the Labour Leader’s Office. J.Waterson, ‘Naz Shah’s Apology Was Not Edited by Labour Officials,’ BuzzFeed News, 27 April 2016. 98 D. Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 13. 99 Elgot, ‘Naz Shah.’ 100 Kat Buckingham, former Chief Investigator in the Labour Party’s Disputes Team in the Panorama broadcast, ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?” 10 July 2019.

4 KEN LIVINGSTONE AND THE CRIMES OF ZIONISM

In an interview for BBC London, Livingstone told the broadcaster Vanessa Feltz that Shah was a “deep critic of Israel and its policies. He suggested that her remarks were over-​the-​top but she’s not antisemitic”. The second of Shah’s statements, it will be recalled, was that Israel had committed war crimes. This phrase, Livingstone insisted, had been accurate: Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians ... in almost all these conflicts the death toll is usually between 60 and 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.1 From there, and within the context of what was supposedly a defence of his fellow Labour MP, Livingstone managed to work into his interview the argument that Israel was a rogue state, because it had been born out of an alliance with Nazi Germany: Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism –​this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.2 Livingstone’s remarks were repeated on the national news, on the front pages of the Mail, Mirror, Telegraph, and Guardian, and became a subject of intense discussion seemingly everywhere. The journalist William Davies’ advice on how to fight and win a culture war goes as follows: “Identify the most absurd or unreasonable example of your opponents’ worldview; exploit your own media platform to amplify it; articulate an alternative in terms that appear calm and reasonable; and then invite people to choose”.3 Although not written with Labour’s troubles in mind, it states pretty

52  Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism

accurately the method adopted by the Conservative Party and the press in response to Livingstone’s remarks. All the Conservatives needed to say was, “Jewish people are troubled by his remarks”, and leave Livingstone to speak –​confident in the knowledge that any words spoken in his own justification would make him look ever worse.

Livingstone and Hitler’s “support” for Zionism A considered attempt to defend Livingstone’s remarks might have gone something like as follows. Israel is a distinctive state in the world in at least two regards. First, it is one of the few states in the world that defines citizenship on a national basis: refusing it to Palestinians, even those who were born on land which is now part of Israel, while permitting any Jew to travel as an immigrant to Israel and settle in that country even if they have never had a connection to it.4 Second, the justification for the existence of Israel, as an ethnic state with unequal citizenship laws, is that Jewish people have a continuous and centuries-​long history of persecution so Jews require a place where they can live peacefully even while the rest of the world burns. As Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism argued, “Antisemitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations; indeed, it is bound to increase, because the fundamental causes of its growth persist and cannot be removed”.5 Third, the belief that Jews and non-​Jews can never live together in peace is an idea that the first generation of state-​builders who drew up the national myths which gave birth to the state of Israel shared with antisemites. While, of course, the conclusions they drew from this “fact” were different, both Herzl on the one side and the antisemites on the other accepted the impossibility that Jews might live in peace in Europe. There was, in other words, a degree of ideological convergence between Zionism and the antisemites.6 Fourth, the ideological overlap between Zionists and antisemites was not an abstract agreement without consequences (in the same way that the enemies in a political argument often agree about certain threshold points, even while they disagree profoundly about the consequences to be drawn from them).7 This is how the political theorist Hannah Arendt, for example, who spent the 1930s campaigning to help European Jews to escape to Palestine, tells the story of that decade: Jews concerned with the survival of their people ... hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of eternal antisemitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence.8 Fifth, in the actual history of the 1930s, this ideological overlap between “Zionists” and “Hitler” had practical conclusions in that the latter gave physical “support” (Livingstone’s word) to the former, in other words, by helping them to power.

Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism  53

In the early stages of this argument –​steps one to two and even perhaps three –​ it contained a fair element of truth. Step four has been a matter of fierce controversy between historians ever since the 1930s. Step five is even worse. The problem with step four are legion. It assumes that there is a thing “Zionism” which is the same in 2016 as it was in August 1933 when the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the institution responsible for organising Jewish immigration to that county, concluded a trade agreement with Nazi Germany (the “Haavara” agreement). Under it, German Jews could invest money in a bank in Germany, to buy exports sold outside.Those who did were able to leave the country, whereupon they would receive payments for the goods they had purchased. The terms of the trade were advantageous to the Nazi State: any money invested was taxed heavily. But the advantage of the agreement, for the Jews who negotiated it, was to facilitate the departure of people from Nazi Germany.The British government which was in control of Mandate Palestine capped migration to that country but placed no limit on the migration of anyone bringing in assets valued at more than £1,000. In that way, people escaped to Palestine who would otherwise have died. The agreement was extremely unpopular within Jewish and indeed Zionist circles, being condemned by both left-​wing (Socialist) Zionists and right-​wing (Revisionist) Zionists. The reason the agreement was unpopular is that up until August 1933, there had been widespread economic boycott of the German regime, and in relation to that the Haavara split a previously united anti-​fascist campaign and secured significant financial advantages for Hitler’s regime.9 “The Zionist movement had one concern”, wrote the historian and broadcaster Karl Sabbagh, “saving the wealth of Germany’s Jews. The agreement itself saved hardly any Jews”.10 Sabbagh was wrong about how many people were rescued. In suggesting the deal was done simply to make protect Jewish wealth he was falling into old ideas of Jewish perfidy. In truth, the pact saved 53,000 lives.11 The reduction of this agreement to the simplistic formulation, “Hitler ... was supporting Zionism” is misleading. It neglects the actual history of that agreement, and the criticism of it by other Zionist groups (so that there is no single, unchallenged Zionist history which can be used to shame the latter), and it assumes that there was in the 1930s a principled model of resistance which could be followed without consequences. While anyone with any knowledge of, for example, the history of anti-​fascist resistance movements in occupied Europe would know that they too had their critics and their dilemmas,12 their “tiresome tasks, boredom and greyness, pain and anguish”.13 No physical resistance against an enemy on Hitler’s scale could have taken place without a similar dynamic of success and failure and moral accounting. Step five in the above logic chain is no better. For what Livingstone appeared to be saying was that Hitler had supported Zionism, and this support was material and worth talking about nearly 90 years later. That idea takes a relatively small moment in the 15-​year history between 1933 (Hitler’s accession to power) and 1948 (the formation of the State of Israel), and gives it an explanatory importance

54  Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism

alongside –​the Arab revolt of 1936–​39, the world war, the murder of six million people in the Holocaust, the clashes between Jewish and Arab populations in Israel and between both and the occupying military power Britain –​and says that among all these great historical processes, Hitler’s “support” is worth talking about. This was just baffling, strange, and obviously an exaggeration. It is very hard to make sense of that move unless we see Livingstone as having been shaped by an irrational worldview which was held by people other than just him (although he was capable of absorbing it) and which caused him to replace what had happened in the past with what all his political instincts were telling him must “really” be true: that is, that Israel had been complicit in the Holocaust, even 15 years before any Israeli state was founded, in the activity of groups saving other people from slaughter. This is not to suggest that Haavara was a mere happenstance, nor to ignore the anger which many Jews in the 1930s felt towards its signatories, but we need to have a sense of the totality. So, for example, Gilbert Achcar, the author of The Arabs and the Holocaust –​a classic study of the relationship between the Arab people of the Middle East and the region’s Jewish inhabitants –​devotes merely two paragraphs to the Haavara.14 The simplest demolition of Livingstone came not from Guido Fawkes but from another Conservative blogger Iain Dale. He interviewed Livingstone during the crisis.Afterwards, he characterised Livingstone’s words as a form of political Tourette’s: In a 13-​minute interview with me on Wednesday afternoon, he mentioned Hitler twelve times. I know because I could see people on Twitter counting the mentions as the interview progressed. Not a good place to be.15 Others put more care into their response. In 2017, David Baddiel16 tried to engage with what Livingstone had said, and with those who had defended him by pointing to the fact of the Haavara agreement. That agreement, Baddiel insisted, by itself proved nothing: The statement “Hitler supported Zionism” is not a fact. It’s an interpretation. An interpretation of a particular historical moment.17 He summarised the Haavara agreement policy in the 1930s, when the forced emigration of Jews from Germany was pushed further along by various Nazi economic incentives allowing those who fled to Palestine to get some of their stolen assets back.18 That is not Adolf Hitler supporting the idea of a Jewish state It is the Nazis taking advantage of the terror and despair of fleeing refugees to get more of them to leave the country. It is just the thin edge of the wedge of Nazi horror.19 If you are going to understand the past, Baddiel suggested, and to blame people for making the wrong moral decisions then at the very least you need to understand

Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism  55

why some people (“Zionists”) might have considered this choice. If you want to call them misguided, you need to understand what other options were available to them: The real problem, in a way, is the tone of Livingstone when giving this interpretation. There’s no sympathy. No compassion –​no sense of the tragedy behind this.20 Livingstone was looking to the history and finding excuses to blame the victims: It’s just complacently presented as a deal that Hitler made with German Zionists, and therefore –​and this, of course, is the point, the banal, shit point –​ a way of confirming that Zionism is bad.Through an association with the top bad thing, Hitler.21 Labour might have rescued itself from the affair with its dignity intact. After all, this was not the first time that Livingstone had been accused of baiting Jewish people. In February 2005, when he was mayor of London, Livingstone had objected to an Evening Standard photographer who he said was harassing his guests. A journalist, Oliver Finegold, introduced himself as working for the same paper, and Livingstone asked if he had been “a German war criminal”. When Finegold objected to the remark, saying that he was Jewish, Livingstone replied that he was “just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?”22 Livingstone was referred to the NEC for disciplinary sanction. He was criticised by both Corbyn and the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who demanded an immediate apology.23 Jon Lansman said, “A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on antisemitism racism & Zionism. It’s time he left politics altogether”.24 It seemed inevitable that Livingstone would apologise or be expelled, and that the issue would be resolved quickly. But, setting the pattern for the years that would follow, neither happened. Labour’s response was painfully slow. Livingstone’s remarks were made on the morning of 28 April 2016. Corbyn was asked to comment on them on ITV, and while he disassociated himself from Livingstone he did so in a passive voice, setting out not his reaction but that of Labour’s NEC: There were very grave concerns about the language he used in an interview this morning. We had a discussion about it and decided we would suspend him, and he would go through an investigation by the party.25 This placed the burden of resolving the problem on Labour’s disciplinary apparatus. As a matter of Labour Party’s institutional arrangements, it was the correct constitutional approach, but it showed little empathy in relation to the annoyance Livingstone had caused. Corbyn did eventually say that Livingstone’s views were actually intolerable (“Ken Livingstone’s comments have been grossly insensitive,

56  Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism

and he has caused deep offence and hurt to the Jewish community”), but not until later.26 Livingstone did leave Labour over this incident, resigning before he was expelled, but only in May 2018, more than two years after the comments were made, after incomplete disciplinary processes and after Livingstone had repeatedly defended his remarks.27 Within the Labour left, JVL reprinted Livingstone’s resignation statement, while adding, “We can find no evidence of antisemitism in any of the statements for which he has been attacked”.28 Chris Williamson MP regretted Livingstone’s expulsion, saying that Livingstone was a “towering figure” in the Labour movement, “He popularised progressive socialism and was labelled a ‘loony leftie’ nearly 40 years ago for his efforts to champion public services, stand up for marginalised groups and fight all forms of racism”.29 In 2016, the response of much of the online left was also to oppose disciplinary action, insisting either that Livingstone had been right (the Canary, Vox Political),30 or that he was wrong but not antisemitic. Others did not seek to defend Livingstone’s comments, but tried to turn the story against the Labour right, for example, by digging up instances when Corbyn’s critics had been slow to criticise antisemitism and accusing them of hypocrisy (Skwawkbox).31 Others published declarations of generality which pledged their support for Corbyn’s leadership and condemned Labour’s critics for weaponing antisemitism, but said nothing at all about Livingstone’s comments, neither accepting nor criticising them (Jewish Socialist).32 It would be possible to portray these websites as unattached to the Corbyn movement, mere outliers pursuing their own course. But several of these media had links to the Corbyn or his supporters. Skwawkbox, for example, would go on to repeatedly publish articles supportive of Karie Murphy, executive director of the Labour Party’s Leader’s Office,33 endorsing not the Corbyn project in general but her personally. Supporters of the Jewish Socialist Group meanwhile would go on to play leadership roles within the Corbyn-​supporting JVL. Moreover, at crucial moments, Corbyn benefitted from the support of the likes of the Canary. During the 2017 election, these sites were the route through which a pro-​Corbyn message reached a wide audience. In that election, only five of the 100 most-​shared stories supported the Conservatives, while nearly half were pro-​ Labour. In 2017, the Canary had more viral stories in the top 100 than the Daily Mail, Telegraph, and Express combined.34 Although outside the structures of the party, such websites played a crucial part in “Corbynism”, breaking through what felt like a media blockade against any sympathetic coverage of his leadership. A much smaller number of Corbyn supporters did oppose Livingstone’s remarks unequivocally and from the start. For example, Jon Lansman of Momentum wrote, “A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on antisemitism racism & Zionism. It’s time he left politics altogether”.35 But the effect of Lansman’s intervention was only to draw further online criticism of him. According to Asa Winstanley, associate editor of the pro-​Palestinian Electronic Intifada, in speaking out, Lansman had “joined the witch hunt”.36

Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism  57

On Twitter, the journalist Owen Jones wrote, “Ken Livingstone has to be suspended from the Labour Party. Preferably before I pass out from punching myself in the face”. In response, the pro-​Corbyn press scrutiny campaign Media Lens called Jones “tragicomic” and “McCarthyist”.37 Corbyn’s biographer Richard Seymour (who had in the past spoken out against antisemitism and would do so again in future),38 wrote, “I’ve never seen anything so shameful, so truly cowardly yet also belligerent and full of self-​importance, as @OwenJones84 today”.39 Seymour later clarified his own remarks, acknowledging that Livingstone’s comments were poorly phrased, and “a series of accumulating hostages to fortune”. But, Labour, he insisted, would err should it subject the former London mayor to any reprimand. The mob will not be placated. If you rebuke someone, they’ll demand suspension; if you suspend them, they’ll demand expulsion; if you expel them, they’ll wonder why it took you so long to get round to expelling antisemites and why they seem so drawn to your party in the first place.40 Four years later, this analysis seemed prophetic in more ways than its author intended. Yes, there was frenzy to the demands for action. We saw it, in the introduction, when the mere announcement that a left-​wing history professor was considering voting Labour become enough for hundreds of strangers to challenge him online, and for several to demand his dismissal. No doubt, the historians of our future will struggle to comprehend how the first party leader in British history to have had any sustained experience of anti-​racist activism could be denounced as a racist. If Seymour’s warning was to make sense, and for the prospect of further complaints to be real, we have to assume that in April 2016 when Livingstone took to the airwaves there was a large supply of prominent Labour leftists willing to say things which were either antisemitic or close enough so as to be capable or being criticised like that. How did that happen? Why were antisemites drawn to Labour and the left? The questions are no longer rhetorical; if we are ever going to have a credible left in the future, we need to be capable of answering them.

Were Livingstone’s remarks antisemitic? One of the places to which the discussion of Livingstone’s remarks turned was whether he had been antisemitic. For his defenders, this was an essential strategy towards limiting the damaging of his remarks. Jamie Stern-​Weiner of the New Left Project wrote, There are several historical inaccuracies in these statements, but the basic point –​that in the early-​and mid-​1930s the Nazi regime and the Zionist movement engaged in talks and reached agreements to expedite the emigration of German Jews to Palestine –​is supported by mainstream scholarship.

58  Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism

Livingstone was a “gobshite”, Stern-​Weiner acknowledged, but no antisemite.41 In autumn September 2017, JVL was set up as a campaign to support Corbyn’s leadership. Its chair Jenny Manson was asked for her position on Livingstone’s words. She answered, “Ken Livingstone is not an antisemite”.42 Again, and again, Livingstone’s defenders raised the fact that as mayor of London, he had repeatedly spoken out against anti-​black and anti-​Muslim racism. By definition therefore he was an anti-​racist. As such, his words were incapable of being antisemitic. There were, however, at least two logical non-​sequiturs in this argument. For Livingstone’s mainstream critics, the most important was this. Anti-​antisemitism is not the same as anti-​racism, and in situations of resource conflict, they might be at odds.43 Thus, a non-​Jewish person might make, for example, both pro-​Muslim and anti-​Jewish remarks. If you want to assert someone’s good faith in relation to Jewish people, it is irrelevant that they have supported blacks or Muslims. They are free from the taint of anti-​Jewish racism only if they have repeatedly supported Jews. For Livingstone’s critics on the left, the problem with looking for an imagined “antisemite” and finding that Livingstone was unlike one of them was as follows. It is bad politics to assume that a person is immune to oppressive acts because they have on other circumstances advocated a general goodwill even to the oppressed group in question. Thus, the bitter experience of the women’s movement is that there are countless vocally “pro-​feminist” men who have beaten or abused women.44 Much the same is just as true when we think of race. When a white person is accused of anti-​black racism in our contemporary world where racism is considered to be wrong, the common experience is to see other white people rallying around the accused in his defence. “How dare you criticise X for racism? I know for a fact that X is no racist”. We create a category of the despicable and uniquely bad individual –​the racist –​who is so consistently and one-​dimensionally bad that they are hardly ever found. Thus, the default response to an accusation of racism becomes, not a sober, patient, analysis of what actually happened but an impassioned defence of the real victim, the white person, who has been accused of a terrible crime.45 Rather than looking for antisemites, in other words, what people need to be looking for was antisemitism.46 Campaigners against racism and sexism have been arguing for years for a conception of racism which looks coolly at the content of the act rather than the supposed moral standing of the perpetrator. Until the Livingstone scandal broke, most of us believed that the left understood this, and would evaluate one of our own when accused of racism in the same way that we might consider a manager, a policeman, or a political opponent. To say that the left failed that test in rallying behind Livingstone would be an understatement. The reason left-​wing defenders of Livingstone fixed on whether Livingstone was antisemitic or not was that if it had been possible to demonstrate in some

Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism  59

objective manner that Livingstone’s critics had gone too far, then, logically, no one could have been offended by his remarks. They prioritised their membership of a side over their own left-​wing politics. Against that approach, it is worth recalling the basis on which Corbyn called for action to be taken against Ken Livingstone (“Ken Livingstone’s comments have been grossly insensitive, and he has caused deep offence and hurt to the Jewish community”) and comparing this to the definition of unlawful harassment contained in our civil law, that is, “unwanted conduct” related to, here, race which has the effect of violating a person’s dignity, or creating an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for them.47 Corbyn characterised Livingstone’s remarks as “grossly insensitive”. This appears to satisfy two key phrases of the definition of harassment. It was both unwanted conduct and offensive conduct capable of violating the dignity of people who heard it. He said that Livingstone’s words had caused “deep offence and hurt to the Jewish community”. In other words, the comments were insensitive –​Jews had been right to be offended. Livingstone’s word carried the risk of having this effect because they related to a shared Jewish experience –​the Holocaust –​and suggested that some Jews had contributed to it. They changed Jews from being the victims to among the  perpetrators of genocide.48 For if Hitler had merely been “supporting” Zionism in 1933 (Livingstone could not even get the date of Hitler’s election right), that suggests that Zionism came first. It began the process of making the Jews an unwanted presence in Germany. Hitler was merely a later-​comer to this process. The meaning of conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic is very wide. It says only that there must be a modest causal link between a protected characteristic (here, the Jewishness of someone listening, and the Jewishness of the Zionists who Hitler was described as supporting) and an offensive act. You can have discrimination without conscious intent.49 We do not need to speculate about what Livingstone’s motives were; we only need to look with care at his words and consider their likely effect on a Jewish audience. Our civil law concept of harassment leaves no space at all for a person’s intention or past acts or indeed any kind of “anti-​racist’s defence” at this stage of the analysis. Its focus is on whether the protagonist of an act has the purpose or effect of harassing another person. In other words, a wholly stupid and unintended act done carelessly, so long as it has the effect of harassing another person, is still unlawful discrimination, and is still in this way recognisably “racist”. What Corbyn seems to have accepted was that Livingstone’s remarks were unwanted conduct which related to a relevant protected characteristic (the Jewish ethnicity of the people who approved the Haavara agreement), and which caused a hostile or degrading environment for British Jews. Although Corbyn was not asked to examine them through the prism of discrimination law, his analysis suggests that they were capable of being acts of antisemitic harassment.50

60  Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism

Notes 1 ‘Labour Antisemitism Row: Read the Ken Livingstone Interview Transcripts in Full,’ Independent, 28 April 2016. In the ten years up to 2019, 195 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 3,485 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, with the largest number of people being killed during Israel’s 2014 assault in Gaza. H. Mattar, ‘Five Reasons Why Voting for Netanyahu Was a Rational Choice for Jewish Israelis,’ 972 Magazine, 12 April 2019. 2 ‘Labour Antisemitism Row.’ 3 W. Davies, ‘The Politics of Like and Dislike,’ London Review of Books, 30 July 2020. 4 ‘The Law of Return,’ in P. S. Alexander, Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 166–​167. 5 T. Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover, 1988 edn), chapter II. He was answered by Hannah Arendt who spoke witheringly of the “doctrine of an ‘eternal antisemitism’ in which Jew-​hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives only more or less opportunity. Outbursts need no special explanation because they are natural consequences of an eternal problem”. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017 edn), p. 7. 6 S. Ury, ‘Strange Bedfellows? Antisemitism, Zionism, and the Fate of “the Jews”,’ American Historical Review 123/​4 (2018), pp. 1151–​1171; I. Pappé, Ten Myths about Israel (London:Verso, 2016), p. 142. 7 T. Greenstein, ‘Why Ken Livingstone Was Right,’ Weekly Worker, 23 June 2016. 8 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 9. 9 E. Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (New York: Dialog Press, 1984). 10 K. Sabbagh, The Antisemitism Wars (Bloxham: Skyscraper, 2018), p. 32. 11 G. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-​Israeli War of Narratives (London: Saqi, 2010), p. 19. 12 In the words of the Italian anti-​fascist partisan Giovanni Pesce, In this war each of us had made his choice. Not one of us had had a gun put in his hands without being told why. He has chosen the side in complete conscience; and the same was true with the fascist on the balcony. Each pays the debt he has agreed to pay. C. Pavone, A History of the Italian Resistance (London:Version, 2013), p. 48. 13 A. Brossat and S. Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (London:Verso, 2017), p. 132. 14 Achcar, The Arabs, pp. 19–​20, 135. 15 I. Dale, ‘Iain Dale: Guess Who Mentioned Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler … and,Yes, Hitler?’ Conservative Home, 7 April 2017. 16 Baddiel is sometimes criticised by supporters of the Labour left for commenting on antisemitism, on the grounds that he is a comedian, not a historian, and should limit his views accordingly. But he has carried out significant historical research for his novels, including one based on the detention of German Jews by the British wartime government. D. Baddiel, The Secret Purposes (London: Abacus, 2004). 17 D. Baddiel, ‘Why Ken Livingstone Has It So Wrong over Hitler and Zionism,’ Guardian, 6 April 2017. 18 Baddiel, ‘Why Ken Livingstone.’ 19 Baddiel, ‘Why Ken Livingstone.’ 20 Baddiel, ‘Why Ken Livingstone.’

Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism  61

21 Baddiel, ‘Why Ken Livingstone.’ 22 H. Muir, ‘Livingstone Faces Inquiry over Nazi Guard Jibe at Jewish Reporter,’ Guardian, 12 February 2005. 23 ‘John McDonnell Asks Ken Livingstone to Apologise over Labour Antisemitism Row,’ Sky, 30 April 2016. 24 M. Weaver, ‘Timeline: Events Leading to Ken Livingstone Suspension,’ Guardian, 28 April 2016. 25 ‘Labour Suspends Three Councillors over Israel Comments,’ ITV, 28 April 2016. 26 D. Sugarman, ‘ “Ken Livingstone’s Comments Were Grossly Insensitive”, says Jeremy Corbyn,’ Jewish Chronicle, 5 April 2017. Corbyn’s evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in summer 2016, still insisting on the necessity of “due process” is quoted in D. Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel, and Antisemitism (London: Biteback, 2018 edn), pp. 296–​298. 27 ‘Ken Livingstone to Quit Labour amid Antisemitism Row,’ BBC News, 21 May 2018; P. Crear, ‘Ken Livingstone Quits Labour after Antisemitism Claims,’ Guardian, 21 May 2018; R. de Peyer, ‘Ken Livingstone Interview: “Apologise over Antisemitism? That Would Involve Me Lying”,’ Evening Standard, 26 May 2018. 28 ‘Ken Livingstone’s Resignation from the Labour Party,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 23 May 2018. 29 Crear, ‘Ken Livingstone.’ 30 E. Sykes, ‘The Labour Party Suspends Ken Livingstone, but Twitter Isn’t Buying It,’ Canary, 28 April 2016; M. Sivier, ‘Livingstone Vindicated: There WAS a Nazi-​Zionist agreement and Hitler DID Support It,’ Vox Political, 28 April 2016. 31 ‘Watson’s Towering Hypocrisy over Antisemitism,’ Skwawkbox, 7 April 2017. (This piece was written not in immediate response to Livingstone’s 2016 remarks, but to the decision a year later to punish him for them, by suspending Livingstone’s membership of the party for a further year). 32 ‘Statement on “Labour’s Problem with Antisemitism”,’ Jewish Socialist Group, 28 April 2016. 33 ‘Exclusive: The Moment and Real Reason Karie Murphy Lost Her LOTO Position,’ Skwawkbox, 20 October 2019; ‘Exclusive: The Truth about “That” Shadow Cabinet Meeting,’ Skwawkbox, 20 October 2019; ‘Smears v Murphy “Lowest Ever” “Absolute Lies” for Which “No Shred of Evidence”, Say Senior Labour Sources,’ 2 February 2020. 34 ‘General Election: Only Five Out of Top 100 Most-​Shared Stories on Social Media Were Pro-​Tory,’ Press Gazette, 12 June 2017. 35 A. Winstanley, ‘How Jon Lansman Joined Labour’s Witch Hunt,’ Electronic Intifada, 7 October 2019. 36 Winstanley, ‘How Jon Lansman.’ 37 Media Lens, ‘Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz: “Hitlergate”,’ Dissident Voice, 17 May 2016. 38 R. Seymour, ‘Three Points about Antisemitism and the Left,’ Patreon, 27 March 2018. 39 @leninology, Twitter, 28 April 2016. Accessed 29 August 2020 40 R. Seymour, ‘Pitch Forks at the Ready,’ Leninology, 28 April 2016. 41 ‘Ken Livingstone: Gobshite Yes, Antisemite No,’ Jamie Stern-​Weiner, 29 April 2016. 42 G. Platt, ‘Head of New Jewish Labour Group Says, “Ken Livingstone Has Never Made a Single Antisemitic Comment”,’ Talk Radio, 29 September 2017. 43 J. Rampen, ‘Momentum, Antisemitism and the Problem with Labour’s Grassroots Activists,’ New Statesman, 4 July 2016; Z. Strimpel, ‘Why Black Lives Matter Protests Are a Catalyst for Antisemitism,’ Telegraph, 20 June 2020; L. Hoare, ‘Blame the Jews for the Slave Trade: Labour’s Latest Antisemitic Slander,’ Haaretz, 2 June 2016.

62  Ken Livingstone and the crimes of Zionism

44 M. Murphy, ‘The Problem with Male Feminists,’ Al Jazeera, 14 July 2018. “Where’s Your Proof? Back Up Your MI5 Smear, Livingstone!”, Workers Press, 10 March 1990; “Corruption Sparked WRP Split”, Workers Press 21 July 1990; “The WRP, MI5 and Libya”, Lobster 20 (1990), p. 20. 45 “Racism is denied, and offence is taken because naming racism is heard as an outrageous accusation”. A. Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p. 54. S. Khilay, ‘Playing the “Race Card”,’ LSE Blog, 2 May 2012; ‘ “There Is No Neutral”: “Nice White People’ Can Still Be Complicit in a Racist Society”,’ NPR, 9 June 2020; D. Renton, Struck Out; How Employment Tribunals Fail Workers and What Can Be Done (London: Pluto, 2012), pp. 69–​85; D. Renton, ‘Culture of Disbelief? Why Race Discrimination Claims Fail in the Employment Tribunal,’ Institute of Race Relations, 24 January 2013. 46 B. Gidley, B. McGeever, and D. Feldman, ‘Labour and Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood,’ Political Quarterly, 10 May 2020. 47 Section 26, Equality Act 2010. 48 K. Kahn-​Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity (London: Repeater, 2019), p. 82. 49 Amnesty International v Ahmed [2009] ICR 1450. 50 After I drafted this passage, the EHRC published its report into Labour’s antisemitism crisis. It focusses on the same interview as I do and finds (as I do) that Livingstone’s remarks were unlawful harassment. Its reasoning however is that they were harassment because at an earlier stage of the same interview he had defended Naz Shah, who had herself accepted that her remarks were inopportune. This combination, it finds, made them harassment. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party (London: EHRC, 2020), p. 29. For reasons I set out below in more detail, this part of the EHRC report is unconvincing. The authors focussed on the less offensive part of Livingstone’s remarks –​ a part which received almost no hostile public comment at the time, unlike the passages I have cited here. D. Renton, ‘The EHRC Report: A Missed Chance,’ Labour Hub, 29 October 2020. For a contradictory view, celebrating this part of the EHRC’s reasoning, D. Hirsch, ‘The “Livingstone Formula” Is Dead,’ Jewish Chronicle, 30 October 2020.

5 JEWS AND THE SLAVE TRADE

By summer 2016, there was an increasing number of complaints that Corbyn’s accession to the leadership had allowed antisemitic behaviour to be indulged. One of the most important of these allegations concerned a long-​term member of the Labour Party, a prominent supporter of the Labour left, and national vice-​chair of Momentum, Jackie Walker, who in June 2016 was accused of “Blam[ing] the Jews for the Slave Trade”.1 When Corbyn was elected leader of the party, he was seen to be taking Labour into political positions such as pacifism and social redistribution which the party had rejected for many years.2 Labour also had a leadership election system in which it was relatively easy for non-​members to sign up, and during the leadership elections of 2015 and 2016 hundreds of thousands of people joined. The rules enabled candidates to stand only if they had the support of 15 percent of MPs and MEPs (a high threshold);3 but once they had passed that threshold there were almost no limits as to who could be signed up as members or as supporters. Both in the 2015 and 2016 contests, Corbyn did well among “party members” (most of whom had joined pre-​2015) and “affiliated supporters” (mainly, members of trade unions) but even better among “registered supporters” (that is, people who had signed up online as wanting to vote in the leadership contest, but without committing to join the party afterwards).4 In response to the prospect of Corbyn becoming leader, the press ran numerous stories to the effect that Labour was being taken over by a new kind of ultra-​ left type. Labour’s new supporters were all supposedly “Trotskyists”, when the combined fees-​paying membership of every Trotskyist group in Britain MPs could not have provided more than two percent of the hundreds of thousands of people streaming into the Labour Party. Labour full-​timers, Constituency Labour Party officials, and supporters of previous leaderships all lobbied to have as many of the new members as possible excluded on factional lines. As the party set in train tens of thousands of investigations, little or any of the press story was

64  Jews and the slave trade

about antisemitism. The most common basis of complaint was rather that prospective members had supported a Green or non-​Labour left candidate.5 In total, 56,000 people were forbidden from taking part, including the veteran left-​wing film director Ken Loach and Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.6 When the complaints of antisemitism grew in number the following year, after the Livingstone scandal, this experience was disastrous. It left a legacy in which complaints were over-​factionalised, and frequently spurious, and a delayed outcome to an investigation was a positive outcome since it favoured the previous status quo. It brought about the exclusion of potential Corbyn voters, while a proper assessment of their wrongdoing was pushed into the far-​distant future. A habit had been established in which lethargy was desirable, but the practical consequence of inertia in 2017 or 2018 was to leave complaints unaddressed. This overuse of disciplinary sanctions taught the Labour left to distrust party officials. The left remembered how the party’s apparatus had been used to wrongly exclude people from membership, and on the basis of manufactured fantasies of left-​ wing “entryism”. The left was aware that the Labour Party apparatus in Southside still regarded the new leadership in a way that was (as even writers sympathetic to the Labour Party bureaucracy acknowledge) “toxic, distrustful and openly mutinous”.7 Therefore, when the focus of the story shifted, and the allegations became that these ultra-​leftists were not in fact Marxists but antisemites, tens of thousands of supporters of the Labour left reacted with instinctive disbelief.We had been taught to believe that the stories could not possibly be true. By 2018, complaints of antisemitism were being made in large numbers. One MP on the right of the Labour Party, Margaret Hodge, named 111 supposed perpetrators of antisemitism, among whom only 20 turned out to be members of the Labour Party.8 A fifth of all complaints made to Labour between spring 2018 and spring 2020, or over 2,000 complaints altogether, came from a single complainant. Investigators doing their best to process his complaints found him “rude and abusive”, with his complaints poorly evidenced and submitted in a format that hindered investigation. In addition, this complainant appears to have a poor understanding of antisemitism, and what kinds of conduct the party can act on. For example, they regularly submit complaints about people sharing Jewish-​related articles, with the comment “They’re not Jewish”.9 Labour Party staff were trying to investigate these complaints, even though the accusations were of behaviour which did not breach Labour’s policies: [I]‌t is not antisemitic to, for example, simply share a Guardian letter in which Jewish people express support for Corbyn, regardless of whether one is Jewish or not.10

Jews and the slave trade  65

Social media was integral to this new phenomenon of repetitive complaint. It provided a documented narrative of people’s views over a long period, and it enabled those who wished to complain a means to legitimise their complaints, by “trawling social media for evidence”.11 Indeed, a typical investigation would see two waves of retrospective trawling. At the start, a complainant12 would look through the Twitter or Facebook account of someone they believed might be guilty of antisemitism, pass on what they found, and then Labour investigators would repeat the process, often with greater care than the original complainant. As the Labour Party explained: Many of the suspensions and [notices of investigation] which have been imposed on individuals following complaints from this complainant have actually been a consequence of the additional social media searches [staff in the Governance and Legal Unit] have conducted, which have revealed much more serious evidence of antisemitism than that submitted.13 No courts in Britain work like this, in encouraging those who are supposed to investigate a complaint to search for other inculpatory material, that is, in mixing together the roles of complainant and adjudicator. To any lawyer, the risks of this procedure would be obvious: it creates the potential for a Kafkaesque world of shifting complaints, in which the “real” content of a dispute is not known till the very end of an investigation and therefore cannot be passed on to the person being investigated with any time for them to reply, reducing any fair chance for them to fairly rebut a false complaint. It also runs the risk of second-​or third-​wave investigations, where the success of fact-​gathering is determined by whether it achieves an intended outcome (expulsion) rather than addressing what someone did wrong and the extent to which they are willing to change. According to Jon Lansman, “We inherited a disputes process which was ‘make it up as you go along’ ”.14 Those being investigated repeatedly complained that the fact that they were subject to complaints was leaked to the press before they themselves were told. Individuals were suspended without warning or being given any opportunity to respond.15 In many cases they were not informed what the complaints were. People were suspended for months or, in some cases, years without there being any apparent progress in the investigation of their case. Delays at this stage contributed to the popular impression that Labour had something to hide. But in 2016 and 2017, the people responsible for investigating the complaints were still the same people who had been in post when the view of the full-​time apparatus was that Corbyn was a menace beyond the furthest edge of legitimate Labour politics. Further the people making the complaints prioritised volume, with 673 complaints made between April 2018 and February 2019,16 a number which was then duly leaked to the press. The result was that investigators had to wade through hundreds of complaints to find the small number that would reward investigation.

66  Jews and the slave trade

The best way to understand the approach of the Labour Party to the complaints is by looking at the three main classes of them, and individuals who belonged to each group. Class 1: expulsion inevitable There existed a class of people who had been members of the Labour Party and who shared unambiguously anti-​Jewish messages, for example, claims that the Holocaust did not happen or that the numbers were exaggerated, or that British or European politics was secretly dominated by a cabal of Jews. So, in August 2019, the recently retired former chair of South Dorset Labour Party was found to have shared on social media, in 2016, a link to a website saying, “Rothschilds bankers did 9/​11 not Muslims”.17 That member was expelled, and understandably so. Class 2: expulsion unwarranted Another typical case is that of Wirral borough councillor (and Jewish woman) Jo Bird who argued at a public meeting for Labour to adopt a more rigorous system of investigating complaints of antisemitism. In an ill-​judged attempt at humour, she called this “Jew process”. She was suspended for nine days and reinstated.18 Anti-​Corbyn newspapers used her story as proof of the racism endemic within the Labour Party, when it was nothing of the sort. Class 3: the difficult cases There were also harder cases, for example, where the person accused of antisemitism was Jewish, or where they had a very long history of promoting left-​wing values, so that the case for investigation and sanction was clear but the nature of the sanction would require careful thought. It is in this context that Jackie Walker should be placed. She faced two rounds of investigations. In the first (during which she was suspended from membership, but no further action was taken) she was accused of having written on social media that Jews were “the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade”. In the second round of investigations, the case against Walker was different. She attended an antisemitism training session at the 2016 Labour Party conference, where she criticised Holocaust Memorial Day saying that it was not inclusive of the victims of other genocides. Walker’s words antagonised many people who have been involved in organising events around that day, many of whom have taken care to broaden it.19 Later, she apologised for these remarks.20 She was accused of bringing the Labour Party into disrepute and invited to a disciplinary hearing, which she agreed to attend only on condition that the panel permitted her to make an opening statement in her defence. This request was declined, after which Walker refused to attend the hearing –​and was expelled.21 The account here will focus on something which tended to get lost –​namely, had the Labour Party been correct to vindicate Jackie Walker in her first disciplinary process? On 4 May 2016, as we have seen, Jackie Walker was suspended from the Labour Party for the first time. The reason she was suspended was because of a Facebook discussion in which she had described Jews as the chief financiers of the slave trade. Had the Atlantic slave trade been chiefly funded by them, or was Walker imagining racist stereotypes back into history?

Jews and the slave trade  67

The slave trade in England, North America, and Brazil Walker has a Jewish father and Jamaican political activist mother who met in 1950s America.22 Walker later explained that she had researched her family history and learned that she had Portuguese Jewish ancestors who had been involved in the slave trade.23 She claimed that the words “chief financiers” had been taken out of context. “My aim was to argue that there are no hierarchies of genocide; there is no way to quantify or qualitatively describe the indescribable, the indescribably inhumane acts that are part of our histories”. In the original conversation, she had written to a friend who had expressed her horror at Hitler’s crimes: I hope you feel the same towards the African holocaust? My ancestors were involved in both –​on all sides as I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews.24 While Jews had in the past been the victims of racism, Walker acknowledged, they had also been the perpetrators of great historical injustices: [M]‌any Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean. So, who are victims and what does it mean?25 Jackie Walker’s answer to the allegation that her language had been antisemitic was to say that her intention was to advance a non-​racist understanding of what it is to be Jewish, in other words, to remind people that Jews can be both black and white, and in that way to undermine the antisemitic stereotype that Jewish people are all white and middle class and in a position of social and cultural power. She insisted that she was arguing not just for a broad and anti-​racist conception of what it is to be Jewish but also of what it is to be human –​that no one is entitled to force injustice on another person, even if the perpetrator, or people like them, have a long history of suffering. We can understand, then, why those investigating Jackie Walker reinstated her membership. The original Facebook conversation was closed. She had been speaking as a member of the Labour Party, not as its representative. Her language was capable of being presented as being in line with Labour values –​and the investigating officer, Harry Gregson (who was no Corbynite),26 reported back to Southside saying that there was no breach.27 The problem was that the conversation did not stop there, rather Jackie Walker has been repeatedly challenged since about the accuracy of her chief financiers remarks and her response to her critics has been twofold: first, that in context her remarks were not antisemitic, and second, that they were correct.28 In insisting on their essential accuracy, she has made them into a historical claim –​one which can be checked.

68  Jews and the slave trade

As with Ken Livingstone’s attempt to claim historical support for the idea that Hitler had supported Zionism, Jackie Walker’s arguments had a certain, minimal, origin in historical truth, but then departed from it. The Atlantic slave trade lasted between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; it involved the transportation of between 9 and 15 million people.29 Almost every major power contributed to it, including Portugal, Holland, France, and Spain, but none more so than Britain which transported between two and three million people in the eighteenth century alone. The slave trade was an enormous business: it transformed such cities as Bristol, Liverpool, and indeed London, and made tens of thousands of people rich. To give a sense of its scale, the Slave Trade Act 1807 brought a formal end to the trade in the British Empire. In 1832, or a quarter of a century after abolition, still 75 percent of Britain’s coffee, 94 percent of its sugar, and 97 percent of its tobacco were produced by slaves.30 The Slave Compensation Act 1837 provided for compensation to those who had held slaves, in the sum of £20 million, or around 80 percent of UK GDP that year. By comparison, 80 percent of UK GDP in 2020 is £1.5 trillion. If you were to identify anyone as the chief financiers of business on this scale, then that would be the very largest banks, the ones with the closest relationship to the huge private interests that dominated this field. In the first half of the seventeenth century in Britain, that could not be Jews since they were not permitted to live in Britain. In the second half of that century, Jews could live in Britain but were excluded from such companies as the Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa or the Levant Company, which carried out much of the slave trade. These were aristocratic societies, whose membership required making a Christian Oath. The charter of the Levant Company prohibited Jews even from purchasing its stock. A 1674 list of the shareholders of the Royal Adventurers of England shows not a single Jewish investor.31 The largest bank in the eighteenth-​century England was the Bank of England. It was not directly involved in the slave trade but several of its governors and directors were. The most important was Sir Humphry Morice, a director of the Bank of England from 1716, and governor in the 1720s. Morice shipped 25,000 Africans to the Caribbean, making him the foremost financier of slavery in his day.32 He was not a Jew but a Christian. Some Jews did hold shares in the Bank of England: for example, 2.6 percent of all those holding stocks in the Bank of England in 1709 were Jewish. They were some way from being the “chief ” stockholders in that bank.33 In Bristol, in the 1740s and 1750s, a Society of Merchants Trading to Africa united the city’s major traders and provided opportunities for the financing of slavery. Dozens of its members belonged to Christian dissenting minorities, including the Quakers, many of whose prominent members were slave owners. Not one Bristol member of the Society of Merchants Trading to Africa was a Jew. The same picture remained true in the second half of the eighteenth century: 520 slaves ships sailed from Bristol between 1770 and 1807, and none of their owners was Jewish.34

Jews and the slave trade  69

Inside slave colonies certain traders were Jewish and held slaves. In Charleston in 1790, the town’s Jewish community owned a total of 93 slaves. Studies of the Jewish communities of Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, show that slightly less than half held slaves, but we are talking about a small number of families within a larger white population so that of the total number of slaves, the ones with a Jewish owner were a tiny fraction of the whole. David Brion Davis, a historian of the slave trade and its abolition, writes: The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves.35 Jews were present within this slaveholding society, but as a subordinate part of it. In the American South in 1830, Brion Davis wrote, there were: 120 Jews among the 45,000 slaveholders owning twenty or more slaves and only twenty Jews among the 12,000 slaveholders owning fifty or more slaves.36 Several of Jackie Walker’s critics suggested that, consciously or not, she was repeating myths which had taken deep route within black nationalist circles in the United States. Liam Hoare, for example, in Haaretz, Israeli’s equivalent of Britain’s Guardian, accused her of taking up ideas which had been put into print by Louis Farrakhan37 and the Nation of Islam, which has published for many years books and pamphlets insisting that Jews were the chief financier of the slave trade, as part of the former’s unceasing war against black people.38 In that way, Walker could be fitted into a story of what was assumed to be the failure of black people in the United States to extend their anti-​racist sympathies from their own situation to that of their Jewish neighbours.39 Walker insisted that her idea of Jews as the chief financiers of the slave trade had not come from reading Farrakhan but as a result of her research into her own family, and that is why she wrote, “many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade”.40 Walker and her allies searched for historical sources which might justify her case. So, for example, an article published on the JVL website sought to defend Walker from disciplinary sanction by citing the work of historians: Eli Faber says in his book Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight: “However, their contributions to the sugar industry were far more significant when it came to providing capital, exporting sugar, and advancing credit for slaves”.41

70  Jews and the slave trade

Faber, Walker insisted, was not the only historian to have reached this view: As creditors, according to the historian of the Brazilian Jewish community, “they dominated the slave trade”. Faber’s footnote refers to Witnitzer [sic], The Jews in Brazil [sic], 67–​73.42 A “fact” which can be confirmed only by looking at the footnotes in which one historian summarises another historian’s work is not a compelling truth. Walker cited Arnold Wiznitzer and his 1960 book Jews in Colonial Brazil, but that historian had been able to identify only four Jewish people who owned sugar plantation in Brazil between 1630 and 1651, none of them major slave-​owners. Rather than saying Jews dominated the trade, Wiznitzer had actually written that: It cannot be said that the Jews played a dominant role in Dutch Brazil as senhores de engenho. Unquestioningly they played a more important part as financiers of the sugar industry, as brokers and exporters of sugar, as suppliers of Negro slaves on credit, accepting payment of capital and interest in sugar.43 This was a cautious warning against exaggerating the extent of Jewish involvement in slavery. In any event, this supposed proof of how the slave trade had operated was anything but. For what this chapter is discussing –​the slave trade –​was a grotesque and inhuman system which for several centuries treated millions of people as chattels. In that system, there were indeed many people who bought slaves and some who borrowed money from Jews to do so. But this does not mean that Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade. The trade was a huge operation which began with the building and equipping of ships in Europe, the raising of millions of vast sums in finances to enable those fleets to sail, the shipping of those vessels to Africa and the forced enslavement of Africans there, and then their transportation to the New World. In the first stage, the equipment of the ships: Jewish involvement was trivial. In the second stage, the acquisition of free Africans and their conversion to slaves:44 Jewish participation was again minimal. To say –​in the third stage only, when the slaves were put on sale and in one country, Brazil –​some Jews loaned money to some purchasers of slaves does not make them the chief financiers of the trade. In his 1998 book, Faber noted that Jewish involvement in the slave trade in Brazil lasted from just 1630 to 1651. During this period Jews played a part in the slave trade, although they were not its “chief ” component. What Faber went on to explain, but which Walker declined to communicate to her readers, was a sense of scale. In these 21 years 26,286 slaves were imported into Brazil. Between 1600 and 1700 as a whole 560,000 slaves were imported into Brazil, and between 1760 and 1830, a further 1,750,000 slaves were imported into Brazil. The reason why these different periods matter is that after 1651, Brazil was subject to the Inquisition and no Jewish presence was tolerated. So, even if Jewish middlemen had handled every

Jews and the slave trade  71

transaction between 1631 and 1651, which (as Faber observed) they most certainly had not, Jewish association with the slave trade could not have affected more than one percent of Brazilian slaves.45 This, it should be recalled, was in Jackie Walker’s account the best example and the clearest case of Jews as the chief financiers of the slave trade. At first, large parts of the online left supported Walker. So, for example, Guardian columnist Owen Jones initially opposed Walker’s suspension, arguing that the impression which had been given of her as an antisemite was “beyond ludicrous”, before later breaking with her.46 Jamie Stern-​Weiner insisted that behind Walker’s account of the slave trade was “a universalist compassion and a sober sense of historical perspective”.47 Momentum, however, immediately distanced themselves from her, with its steering committee voting to remove her as vice-​chair.48 The long the affair went on, the more Corbyn supporters agreed with Momentum. So, in 2019, when JVL hosting on its website an article deprecating her expulsion as a “great injustice”, an open letter was circulated calling for her to be reinstated.49 Four hundred people signed it, but no MPs, and what was striking about the list was the very large presence of people who were not members of the Labour Party, and in many cases never had been.50 One of the reasons why Walker went from being a popular to an isolated figure within the Labour left was that following her initial comments on the slave trade, she said more and more things each of which seemed to resonate with hostility for anyone who disagreed with her. These remarks included not just the remarks about Holocaust Memorial Day which led to her expulsion from the Labour Party, but also criticisms of Momentum’s Jon Lansman, for seeking to conciliate those who complained about antisemitism in the Labour Party (“To hear Jon Lansman go on the media and describe the demonstration outside Westminster as an ‘antiracist’ demonstration made my blood run cold”.)51 She maintained that British society was incapable of treating all victims of racism equally, “We know there are some groups that are seen as more important than others. We all that there are some groups who can get to the media more than others”.52 Walker described the Labour investigation as a “a lynching court” which had “been structured by racists” in order “to make sure the head of a Jewish black woman is put on the plate for the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement and their supporters”.53 She again insisted that Holocaust Memorial Day events did not commemorate any genocides save for that of the Jews. She wrote, “Why is the Nazi Holocaust more important? We all know the answer!! Because it’s white lives that matter duh!”54 Walker and her remaining supporters kept on insisting on the truth of what she had written, although this required them to recast Walker as having employed different words from the ones she had actually used. She was now said to have written, “Among the chief financiers”,55 or “Jews were involved”,56 as if in toning down her language it would eventually approximate to the truth. The defence of her original comments required her supporters to mangle the works of the historians she cited, converting warning against over-​emphasis into lurid insistence on Jewish centrality.

72  Jews and the slave trade

Internalised antisemitism For Jackie Walker’s supporters, it was significant that she is Jewish. This has been a striking feature of the Labour Party complaints in general. Many of the accusers are Jewish, but several of the accused are Jewish, often anti-​Zionist Jews who have protested against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Such Jews are both accused of antisemitism and repeatedly its victims. It is entirely plausible that Jews (both pro-​Zionists and anti-​Zionists) could be trapped into antisemitic modes of thinking. Non-​Jews rarely understand this, but in fact antisemitism has all the inward-​facing element of every other prejudice. Think of all those mothers who have passed on to their daughters the idea that they should be feminine or princesses. Think of lesbians or gay people who internalise homophobia and repeat it privately.57 These things happen, and it is the same with antisemitism. Being told that the world is secretly run by a cabal of invisible, hostile people, you can start internalising that logic, and find yourself reverting to it when you are criticised and under pressure and searching (as people do on social media) for an immediate and snarky response. Anti-​Zionist Jews especially are often told –​as Walker herself has been told –​ that they are “kapos”,58 in other words, like the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps who were given privileges in return for supervising gangs of prisoners. This is the equivalent in Jewish circles of when black people are accused of being “coconuts” (white on the inside) –​it is every bit as unpleasant as that insult. Indeed, if anything, it has more specific and even nastier connotations: it treats dissident Jews as if they were the accessories to genocide. Jackie Walker received a large quantity of abuse of this sort. To give just two examples: on Twitter, Rene Delavarre told Walker: We should send people like you to the fucking gas chamber! Palestine does not exist, nor did it ever exist. Israel has been a Jewish homeland for 3,000 years.59 While J. Steinhardt-​Jacobs told her: Listen bitch, what part of you ain’t a Jew so you don’t get to decide what is Antisemitism don’t you understand.60 And there have been many further instances of abuse of this kind, often based on arguments that because Walker was only half-​Jewish, she was not a real Jew.61 It is a tenet of the Jewish religion, derived from the book of Deuteronomy,62 that the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish. Liberal and Reform Judaism extend this principle to the child of a Jewish father; Orthodox Judaism does not. But Jewish life is full of people who had a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother, and yet are treated by everyone around them as Jews. So, for example, the leftist lawyer Hans Litten who forced Adolf Hitler to testify in 1931 after members of his party were put on trial for their part in the murder of Communists is usually described as Jewish

Jews and the slave trade  73

and treated as having played a heroic role within the Weimar Jewish community, although he did not attend synagogue and his Jewish ancestry came only through his father (who then converted to Christianity).63 Without needing to see Walker as a heroic figure comparable to Litten, anyone can grasp that entrance to the category “Jew” cannot be dependent on a person’s political opinions. Why, Walker’s critics asked, were her opponents incapable of acknowledging her as a Jew; was it because she was an anti-​Zionist? Or was it because she was black?64 Following the Equality Act, legal definition of harassment, telling a Jewish person that she should be in a gas chamber –​like the victims of the Holocaust –​is likely to qualify as unwanted conduct, related to a relevant protected characteristic, Walker’s Jewish heritage. It would be hard to deny that exchanges of this sort must be intimidating and hostile. We should be capable of acknowledging that the campaign against Jackie Walker has been more violent, more clearly a form of racial harassment, than the post for which she was originally criticised. But the fact that she has been abused does not make her original post retrospectively true. Chapter 2.I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book provides that members should not “engage in any conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the Party”. The rule continues, by defining such conduct to include, any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on … race; religion or belief … these shall include but not be limited to incidents involving racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia or other racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions.65 The focus of the rule is on prohibiting behaviour, rather than enabling its punishment. The point of the disciplinary process is not to punish people, or to prove the moral standing of a party in throwing out those it rejects, but to dissuade certain kinds of behaviour by causing those who might go on to do something objectionable to think before they act. Undoubtedly, Walker’s comments –​and her repeated defence of them –​have engaged that rule, meaning that it was appropriate for her to be investigated. But in a fair disciplinary process, you do not simply ask whether a rule was breached, but what sanction should follow. In a calmer atmosphere, any objective investigator would have asked whether Walker’s expulsion was appropriate. Her offence was to say that Jews were the perpetrators of the slave trade; was she able to accept this was a myth? Could she withdraw the statement and apologise for it? Could she grasp that her original post replicated a racist way of understanding the world? Jackie Walker had said that if her historical understanding was shown to be wrong, which it is, “I will of course adapt and change my views as necessary”.66 That is exactly the spirit in which the discussion should have taken place: with a focus on whether Walker was capable of relenting her views and admitting she had been wrong. Was she capable of understanding that she had angered and upset people? Could she apologise for that?

74  Jews and the slave trade

In 2016, that was a discussion that should have been had. Its outcome could not have been known in advance. The task of reducing racism is more important than even the task of making Labour electable. When the Labour Party excluded members for antisemitic words or action, it did not reduce by one the total number of antisemites in society, it only made them someone else’s responsibility. Their views still required to be challenged –​simply excluding them, without listening, or answering them, or explaining –​achieved no progress towards that goal. Those were the sorts of steps you might hope from a normal disciplinary process without the fixation of thousands of people staring at it, loudly declaring their own moral righteousness and their contempt for anyone who disagreed with them.

Notes 1 L. Hoare,‘Blame the Jews for the Slave Trade: Labour’s Latest antisemitic Slander,’ Haaretz, 2 June 2016. 2 The obvious comparison was George Lansbury, product of the Polar Rates Rebellion, and pacifist, who led the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. S. Fielding, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: George Lansbury Reborn?’ Notts Politics, 4 January 2016. 3 The existence of the threshold was the context to the 2016 legal battles as to whether an incumbent leader also required the same level of support before standing: Foster v McNicol & Anor [2016] EWHC 1966. 4 H. Stewart and R. Mason, ‘Labour Leadership: Jeremy Corbyn Wins Convincing Victory over Owen Smith,’ Guardian, 24 September 2016. 5 P. Wintour and F. Perraudin, ‘Labour Leadership Election: 260 Members of Rival Parties Ask to Vote,’ Guardian, 7 August 2015. 6 Beckett and Seddon, Jeremy Corbyn, p. 224. 7 G. Pogrund and P. Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn (London: Bodley Head, 2020), p. 5. 8 D. Rosenberg, ‘What Do Jennie Formby’s Stats Tell Us about Antisemitism in the Labour Party?’ Morning Star, 11 February 2019. 9 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014–​2019,’ Labour Party, March 2020, p. 844. 10 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit.’ 11 ‘The Work of the Labour,’ p. 847. 12 So, for example, the source of the complaints against Jackie Walker was widely reported to have been the Israel Advocacy Movement, a group founded by Joseph Cohen, who had become a campaigner against Palestine solidarity actions following the wave of public opposition to Israel’s summer 2014 offensive against Gaza. L. Davies and S. Lukes, ‘Unravelling the Charge of Labour Party Antisemitism,’ Morning Star, 27 May 2016; J. Stern-​Weiner, ‘An Outrage against Justice and Truth,’ Labour Briefing, 26 May 2016. In summer 2019, the Israel Advocacy Movement was again in the news after it organised a debate with former chairman of the young BNP Mark Collett, titled, ‘Should Jews Support a White Ethno-​State?’ 13 ‘The Work of the Labour,’ p. 848. 14 Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 15 Davies and Lukes, ‘Unravelling.’

Jews and the slave trade  75

16 ‘What Do Jennie Formby’s Stats.’ 17 M. Front, ‘Ex local Labour Chair Suspended over Social Media Posts including Shoah Denial,’ Jewish News, 19 August 2019. 18 L. Harpin, ‘ “Jew Process” Labour Councillor Suspended for Second Time amid Bid for Election to Governing Body,’ Jewish Chronicle, 8 February 2020. 19 J. Mulhall, ‘Jackie Walker Is Wrong about Holocaust Memorial Day –​and Should Know Better,’ Left Foot Forward, 30 September 2016. 20 A. Cowburn, ‘Momentum Vice Chair Jackie Walker Apologises over “Appalling” Holocaust Comments,’ Independent, 28 September 2016. 21 ‘Press Release by Jackie Walker: Denied Right to Speak in Her Own Defence,’ Labour against the Witch Hunt, 26 March 2019; J. Elgot, ‘Labour Expels Jackie Walker for Leaked Antisemitism Remarks,’ Guardian, 27 March 2019. 22 ‘Jackie Walker Responds to Accusations of Antisemitism,’ Jews for Justice for Palestinians, 5 September 2016. 23 ‘Jackie Walker Responds.’ 24 ‘Jackie Walker Responds.’ 25 ‘Jackie Walker Responds.’ 26 Gregson was Labour’s acting South East England organiser. By 2019, he had ceased working for the Labour Party and was, according to Pogrund and Maguire, “the de facto general secretary of the breakaway Independent Group”. G. Pogrund and P. Maguire, Left Out:The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (London: Bodley Head, 2020), p. 131. 27 Gregson summarised their conversation as follows: Whilst Ms Walker admitted making the comments in the Facebook posts and continues to endorse her statements, she clarified what the intention of the statements were and placed them into a wider context. Perhaps one of the most controversial views expressed in the posts was that she believed there was a “Jewish particularism”, and they counted their suffering above others. Ms Walker argued that she was only referring to some Jewish people and that she believes that in every culture or race there are some people who will believe their suffering has been worse than all others. He concluded, “Whilst I can understand that some people would be offended by her views, I do not believe that these views are a breach of Labour Party rules”. ‘The Work of the Labour,’ p. 362 28 ‘Jackie Walker Responds’; Jackie Walker (@Jackiew80333500), Twitter, 23 May 2018; Jackie Walker, Twitter, 16 August 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 29 E. Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 2; A. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 14–​15. 30 D. Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-​History (London:Verso, 2011), p. 13. 31 A. C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Routledge, 1964), p. 155; Faber, Jews, p. 23. 32 N. Grabstas,‘Power & Profit: Slave Traders in Parliament & the Life of Humphrey Morice, 1690–​1730,’ MA thesis, Dalhousie University, December 2018. 33 Faber, Jews, Slaves, p. 29. 34 Faber, Jews, Slaves, pp. 41–​42. 35 ‘Where the False Claim That Jews Controlled the Slave Trade Comes From,’ My Jewish Learning, 2016. 36 ‘Where the False Claim.’

76  Jews and the slave trade

37 For instances of Farrakhan’s antisemitism, P. Berman (ed), Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), pp. 1–​3, 183–​203. 38 Hoare, ‘Blame the Jews.’ 39 Chapter 16 of this book asks whether that narrative of US history is true. 40 The names of these ancestors or their connections to her have never been revealed; all the rest of us have been expected to take their existence on trust. 41 ‘Jackie Walker Responds to Accusations of Antisemitism,’ Jews for Justice for Palestinians, 5 September 2016. 42 ‘Jackie Walker Responds.’ 43 A. Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 70. 44 D. Renton, D. Seddon, and L. Zeilig, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2007), pp. 13–​22. 45 Faber, Jews, Slaves, pp. 261–​262. 46 ‘Just beyond Ludicrous,’ David Paxton, 1 October 2020. 47 Stern-​Weiner, ‘An Outrage against Justice and Truth.’ 48 P. Walker, ‘Jackie Walker Stripped of Momentum Post in Antisemitism Row,’ Guardian, 3 October 2016. 49 ‘The Expulsion of Jackie Walker Is a Great Injustice,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 27 March 2019; ‘Reinstate Jackie Walker! Sign the Letter the Guardian Refused to Print,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 9 April 2019. 50 ‘Reinstate Jackie Walker!’ 51 L. Harpin, ‘Jackie Walker Posts Bizarre “Racial Hierarchy” Rant on Facebook,’ Jewish Chronicle, 9 April 2018. 52 Harpin, ‘Jackie Walker Posts.’ 53 L. Harpin, ‘Suspended Labour Activist Jackie Walker in “White Millionaire Elite” Rant against Jewish MP,’ Jewish Chronicle, 24 March 2019. 54 ‘People Care More about the Holocaust Because Jews Are White, Claims Former Momentum Vice Chair and Expelled Labour Member, Jackie Walker,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 9 June 2020. 55 Moche Machover, in the film Witch-​Hunt, online at https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=ISR0fdpZGyc, at 14:30–​14:35. Accessed 26 August 2020. 56 Lewis Gordon, Witch-​Hunt, 14:35–​14:45. 57 C. Sittenfeld, ‘The Prairie Wife,’ New Yorker, 13 February 2017. 58 @Eastendhammers, Twitter, 30 January 2020, @daviddjsaunders, Twitter, 30 April 2020. Accessed 26 August 2020. 59 ‘Jackie Walker –​Abused and Vilified,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 11 February 2019. 60 ‘Jackie Walker –​ Abused’ Jewish Voice for Labour. 61 ‘Jackie Walker and the Jewish Jacket,’ Jew Know, 25 July 2017. 62 Chapter 7, verses 3–​4. 63 B. C. Hett, Crossing Hitler:The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Another patrilineal Jew, a worshipper at a Masorti synagogue whose children were refused access to the Orthodox-​run JFS school, is discussed in E, R (on the application of) v Governing Body of JFS & Anor [2009] UKSC 15, para 6. 64 Lewis Gordon, Witch-​Hunt, 20:10–​20:20; Richard Kuper, Witch-​Hunt, 20:50–​20:55. 65 Williamson MP v Formby [2019] EWHC 2639, para 8. 66 ‘Jackie Walker Responds.’

6 SEEING NO EVIL Trump and the US right

One theme of this book is that the public expression of antisemitism has increased dramatically over the past decade, most rapidly in the United States1 (although it has risen in Britain too), and that the most important moment in its re-​emergence was the presidential election campaign which culminated in the victory of Donald Trump in November 2016. The effect of Trump’s success can be traced in the growing popularity of antisemitic online memes and messages, and in antisemitic actions offline. So, for example, on Twitter; the Anti-​Defamation League (ADL) found that 2.6 million anti-​Jewish tweets were sent between summer 2015 and summer 2016. The ADL was especially concerned with tweets directed at anti-​Trump or pro-​Democrat journalists, who were accused of being unpatriotic Jews. Some 800 journalists were targeted in this way, and 45 million people read the antisemitic messages directed at them.2 Indeed between 2016 and 2017, the ADL found that the total number of antisemitic tweets rose again –​by more than 50 percent.3 Indeed, if we look beyond Twitter, the picture is the same. When researchers measure the rise of neo-​Nazi, antisemitic, and other far-​r ight channels on YouTube since 2016, they do not use a linear scale, as you might if these channels were growing at the rate of, say, just 10–​20 percent per year. Many of the most effective popularisers of far-​r ight content were capable of building their audience by factors of 10 or 100 per year; with the result that researchers could map the growth of their audience using only a log scale.4 So, for example, James Allsup was a member of the far-​right Identity Evropa group. In 2016, he first came to the attention of the press when he was a student Republican at Washington State University (WSU) and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump. Together with fewer than a dozen other people who supported him, Allsup put up a “Trump Wall” at WSU.5 He later invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak.6 Both events were widely covered in the mainstream Trump-​supporting Republican press and helped to create an image of

78  Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right

Allsup as a young contrarian, boldly standing up to political correctness in all its forms. Prior to November 2015 and Trump’s rise, he had no presence on YouTube at all. In August 2019 YouTube closed his account. By that point, his films had been watched 73 million times.7 The targets of online far-​r ight antisemitism are, as Talia Lavin writes, “random Jews –​not powerful ones of ones even people close to power”: Those who celebrated Donald Trump’s election by toppling graves in Jewish cemeteries in Brooklyn and Philadelphia and St. Louis have been caught –​ but their targets were dead, beyond the ability to manipulate anything at all.8 That attack on ordinary, powerless, Jews was characteristic of antisemitism: The notion of a nefarious plot by Jews ... endures as a fatal threat [because of] the belief that every Jew is engaged in the machinations of evil. Old or young, rich, or poor, every Jew is a soldier in a war against whiteness.9 The ubiquity –​and seeming toleration –​of online antisemitism has encouraged the re-​emergence of a violent street-​based racism. According to the FBI, violent antisemitic attacks rose 29 percent between 2015 and 2018, while the ADL registered 1,000 anti-​Jewish incidents in 2014 and 2015, and nearly double that number in 2017 and 2018.10 Events such as the use of antisemitic slogans by far-​ right activists at Charlottesville in summer 2017 (“Jews will not replace us”),11 or the defence of those protesters by President Trump (“very fine people on both sides”),12 seemed to show that, after years in which antisemitism had been marginal to American politics it was tolerated by one of the country’s two main parties. Indeed, that impression is depressingly accurate. A number of prominent Republican Congressmen including Kevin McCarthy,13 Louie Gohmert,14 Steve King,15 and Paul Gosar16 have spread conspiracy theories in which prominent Jews, such as the financier and Democrat-​donor George Soros, are blamed for any setback suffered by their party. The reason they have done so is that this faction of the American centre-​right (along with President Trump)17 understands American politics as a struggle between “globalists” who would sell out America to her foreign rival China and to various other international institutions which are perceived to have escaped from American control and “economic nationalists” who would defend US interests aggressively. A good example of this everyday economic nationalism was a speech given by Senator Josh Hawley at the National Conservatism Conference in summer 2019. Hawley did not mention race, did not promote theories that white people were being replaced, and there was no attack on George Soros. He avoided the made-​up statistics which have become commonplace on the far right. What Hawley did do, in common with so much of the American centre-​r ight, was frame ordinary political competition as a struggle between nationalists and cosmopolitans:

Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right  79

For years, the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.18 That consensus was not American politics but emerged outside the US nation. For no true American patriot could agree with such liberal opinions: This class lives in the United States, but they identify as “citizens of the world.” They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.19 Such views continued to dominate American society, even at a time when political power (the Presidency, Congress) was held by the right: [T]‌hey subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress. Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.20 In this idea of politics, virtue was defined negatively. The conservatives were not changing America (e.g., by encouraging a rapid increase of gun ownership; or by repeatedly voting for a president with a crude and authoritarian style), rather they were the ones keeping the country as it had always been. Liberals encouraged globalisation, immigration, Chinese competition, and all the sins of free-​market capitalism. Hawley went on to name four American academics whom he accused of promoting cosmopolitan myths –​three out of the four writers named by him (Leo Marx, Richard Sennett, and Martha Nussbaum) were Jews.21 Such anti-​cosmopolitan language has a long history. In the period between the 1870s (when antisemitism emerged in Germany) and 1914, anti-​Jewish racism often played much the same role. It spoke to conservative interests (rural landowners, the army, the Catholic Church, and so on), telling them that their main enemy was a free market urban bourgeoisie, including Jews.22 Once you have split up politics between nationalists and internationalists, it is an easy next step to see Jews not as a group of people who agree or disagree with one in the way that black people or white people do, but as an ideological category –​in today’s terms –​supporters of multi-​national institutions such as the IMF or WHO or World Bank, advocates of liberal policies such as freer migration, and an obstacle in the path of nationalist victory.

Citizens of nowhere This chapter focuses on Donald Trump because between 2016 and 2020 he played a large role in encouraging the reconstitution of the global right, along different

80  Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right

ideological lines to those which had preceded his rise. Between June 2016 and May 2017, three events seemed to follow this same path: the success of Brexit in the 2016 referendum,Trump’s election victory, and Marine Le Pen’s second place in the French presidential election, the largest vote for a far-​r ight party in Europe since 1945. That distinction between nationalists and globalists could be seen in many places other than just the rhetoric of Donald Trump. It could be seen in a diluted form in Theresa May’s first speech as leader of the Conservatives, following the Brexit vote: [T]‌oday, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street.23 In Britain, on this account, political power was not located in Parliament or Downing Street which were held by the Conservatives but somewhere else.The noble ambitions of British patriots were frustrated by people more loyal to those outside the nation: But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.24 One of the themes of this book is that where politics is framed as a struggle between nationalists and internationalists, the result is often a legitimisation of anti-​ Jewish discourse. That is why such Conservatives as Jacob Rees Mogg,25 Dominic Cummings,26 or Sally-​ Ann Hart27 exaggerated the role of George Soros and Goldman Sachs in opposing Brexit, because they saw separating Britain from the EU as a struggle of national liberation, and its politics made most sense to them within an ideology that pitted good nationalists against bad cosmopolitans. Seeing this dynamic clearly does not mean that it is in the interests of Jewish people to respond to it by saying,“If politics is framed in this way then, very well, we shall be internationalists”. For the clash between nationalists and internationalists is not a struggle between a right and a left invigorated by the project of asserting the shared international interests of workers or the poor. The internationalism which is counterposed to this nationalism is the internationalism of multinational institutions: of the EU, and the IMF. In the same way that this framing makes “Jews” into an ethnic class of internationalists, this right-​wing framing also makes instruments of other people, compelling them to take sides with certain positions. It turns “workers” into “white workers”, a social category of people who are deemed to be socially conservative irrespective of what any worker actually thinks.28 Jews are just one of several groups of people who are forced into boxes not of their making.

Trump, philosemitism, antisemitism Some readers will object to the ideas of Trump as a key figure in the global spread of antisemitism. He has a Jewish daughter and he has promoted the interests of

Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right  81

Israel. Trump has spoken at Jewish events. All these characteristics are said to prove that Trump is no antisemite. It is true that Trump has used philosemitic language repeatedly. But as so often happens where people express their admiration for Jews, the kinds of behaviour he fixed on were ones which are unlike how most Jewish people live, and which many Jews would find uncomfortable. So, on 8 December 2019,Trump addressed the Israeli American Council National Summit: A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. Not nice people… But you have to vote for me; you have no choice. You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax. “Yeah, let’s take 100 percent of your wealth away.”29 Trump pretended to make a joke of Jewish disdain for him, saying it was reciprocated. But shared commercial interests, he argued, would bind them to him: Even if you don’t like me; some of you don’t. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes, if [the Democrats] get in.30 Trump and, in his mind, “the Jews” were not merely both businessmen who loved to make money from other people, but they were also staunch patriots. As such, they faced an equal enemy in the form of bad Jews –​in other words, liberals, and anti-​Israeli peaceniks. So many of you voted for people in the last administration. Someday you’ll have to explain that to me, because I don’t think they liked Israel too much. I’m sorry. I don’t think they liked Israel too much.31 The solution to his and their problems,Trump argued, was to convert Jewish radicals into Jewish nationalists –​a task which was in his and his listeners’ joint interests: We have to get the people of our country, of this country, to love Israel more…We have to do it. We have to get them to love Israel more. Because you have people that are Jewish people, that are great people —​they don’t love Israel enough.32 Plainly, in Trump’s mind, he is a Jew-​lover, but what is it about Jews that he admires? He loves the “fact” that Jews are businessmen and hate taxes. He likes the admiration of Jews for a militarised Israeli state and regrets the fact that a significant minority of Jews –​bad Jews –​disagree with him. He shares with the antisemites of a century ago the idea that Jews place their own interests above other people, that Jews are clannish and insular, that Jews formulate plans to advance their own interests, and that Jews have a power which is international.

82  Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right

Moreover, Trump’s philosemitism is not merely a personal affectation but plays to a part of his voting base: Evangelicals who sees the restoration of the Jewish people to statehood in Israel as a prerequisite the speeding up of the millennium.33 These fantasies offer Jews little long-​term benefit.The Book of Romans34 envisages that with the arrival of end-​times the Jews will all be converted to Christianity –​ and cease to exist as Jews. Although Donald Trump’s support is greatest on the right and on the far right of American politics, the role he has played in legitimising anti-​Jewish racism has had an impact even on people who are in other ways unlike him.The murder of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 by a far-​r ight gunman was the worst antisemitic attack in US history. The Pittsburgh killer Robert Bowers insisted that he had not voted for Trump or owned a Make America Great Again cap. Trump, he insisted, had betrayed white racists.35 In the 12 months following those killings, the two most violent attacks took place at the Chabad of Poway synagogue outside San Diego in April 2019 where one worshipper was killed, and in December 2019 when three people were killed at a New Jersey kosher market.36 The San Diego killer John Earnest posted an online manifesto referencing Adolf Hitler and the guru of US white supremacist terrorism, William Pierce. Earnest hated Trump, calling him a “coward”, a “Zionist, Jew-​loving, anti-​White, traito[r]‌”.37 The attackers in New Jersey, David Anderson, and Francine Graham, were black. One was a supporter of the black Hebrew Israelite movement, which holds that black people are the true descendants of Israel and Jews “imposters” (a term used by Anderson). Anderson’s social media posts quoted the Bible, and criticised white police officers as probable supporters of the Klan.38 Anderson had a notion of the true Jewish religion, the Old Testament, which he was defending against newcomers. Meanwhile, John Earnest had been brought up in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a small evangelical denomination. His church was shaped by what is sometimes called “replacement theology”, the doctrine that the Christian church has replaced the Jewish people in God’s biblical promises to Israel. The Jews, in this idea of history, and in Earnest’s words, are “corrupted”, the betrayers of God’s love and trust in them.39 Events in American fly in the face of key parts of the “anti-​antisemitic” consensus in Britain which teaches us that anti-​Jewish racism is simultaneously more widely held than ever before, and also less likely to express itself in violent acts against Jewish targets. In the words of one theorist David Hirsh, “The thing is that contemporary antisemitism always lurks, it’s never explicit, it’s never frank”.40 To which the only possible answer must be: look beyond the people you are arguing with; start seeing all that’s happening as a totality. Because elsewhere in the English-​ speaking world there are antisemites and their guns are loaded. During the 2016 election and after it, Donald Trump repeatedly employed antisemitic myths. He counterposed his message of America First to the risks posed by the “global” power structure, manifested in the “international banks” whom he accused of holding covert meetings with Hillary Clinton. Trump himself was

Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right  83

not shy of using anti-​Jewish symbols, for example, by tweeting images of Hillary Clinton with a pile of money, the words “Most Corrupt Candidate ever”, and a six-​ pointed Jewish star.41 He claimed to be standing against the “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class”, words illustrated with an image of the Jewish CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.42 In an executive order to “Combat the rise of antisemitism”, Trump’s administration committed itself to the struggle against anti-​Jewish racism: “The vile, hate-​ filled poison of antisemitism must be condemned and confronted everywhere and anywhere it appears”.43 But as the young anti-​Zionist Jewish author Em Cohen has written, Trump’s anti-​antisemitism projected his politics, his desires and wants, creating an imaginary Jew as a marker of American virtue. He was forgiving Europe and America for the Holocaust and licensing the West to move on from any residual guilt for its actions. He was crafting an idea of other societies, unlike white Euro-​ America, who had failed to make the same progress, and against whom intervention could be justified. He was doing all this, while simultaneously noting the existence of a considerable minority of American Jews who had no desire to be part of this project of Western chauvinism, and justifying a political struggle against them, as disloyal and alien Jews. “Protecting the Jews”, Cohen wrote, becomes a trojan horse for white Euro-​America’s various colonial and imperialist ventures. Further, white Euro-​America discovered that by assigning itself the task of “protecting the Jew”, it could grant itself the power to determine both who is a Jew and who is an antisemite.44 What Trump was doing, in oscillating between such philosemitism and antisemitism directed against Jews as internationalists, opponents of his politics of America First, was very little different in other words from any other mainstream politician in the United States or Britain. It was different only in that, as ever with Trump, his sense of shame was less, and the switching between the two styles of politics was more brazen and worse concealed.

Trump and his British critics Donald Trump was the American president, the most important politician in the world, and he could access 80 million people directly through his Twitter account. He was a huge presence in British as well as American politics. His views about Jews, both good and bad Jews, gave antisemitic stereotypes an audience they had not enjoyed in decades. Given that he was a more significant factor in the rise of global antisemitism than the Labour Party leftists which this book describes, you might expect that the figures in British politics who denounced Corbyn would also have devoted some real effort to limiting the influence of Donald Trump. Certainly, some understood –​quite as well as this book does –​that Trump was a threat to Jews. Interviewed on Radio Five in November 2016, Chief Rabbi

84  Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right

Ephraim Mirvis labelled Donald Trump a “racist”. As soon as the words had been spoken, however, Mirvis immediately sought to qualify and contextualise what he had just said: [Donald Trump] unfortunately is a racist, somebody who deeply offended many people. However,Trump as president hopefully will be a different character, and time will tell what the Trump presidency will be about.45 Trump in power, Mirvis insisted, would prove to be a moderate: [T]‌he Trump presidency is not going to be like what we’ve seen from Trump in the lead up to his election. Unfortunately, though, as a candidate he has set a tone which has presented a danger to our society.46 A year later, in the US magazine, Newsweek, Mirvis criticised “Populists” (Trump and his supporters) but he did so in the most convoluted language available to him. In 2016, an eagerness to believe some of the most extraordinary rhetoric that we have heard in a generation became the hallmark of our challenged world and left many politicians and social commentators scratching their heads.47 The Chief Rabbi could no longer pretend that legality would tame Trump. Instead, he settled on the rhetorical strategy of insisting that the regime’s racism was merely the latest incarnation of a permanent and timeless problem of gentile hostility towards Jews: Just weeks into 2017 and the rhetoric is fast becoming reality. Unfortunately, this is the essence of a problem that has afflicted humanity throughout history, inspiring hatred and encouraging war at regular intervals.48 This passage reads, at the start, as if Mirvis is building up to a condemnation of Trump and his political language (“the most extraordinary rhetoric that we have heard in a generation”). But the Chief Rabbi was unable to say clearly even what he had acknowledged a year before: that Trump was a racist. He began from a weaker position than he had in 2016, and he went further than he had on that occasion in seeking to excuse and justify the behaviour which he was also criticising. If Trump’s behaviour really was “a problem that has afflicted humanity throughout history”, and represented no intensification of antisemitism which was eternal then why worry about it? Of course, the Chief Rabbi is a significant voice in British politics, and his ability to comment on events in the United States and be heard is less. But even if that is acknowledged, there is still a problem. Rabbi Mirvis was incapable of admitting something which a large majority of American and British Jews could see, namely

Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right  85

that the rise of Donald Trump represented a significant threat to Jews. In 2019, the Chief Rabbi argued that members of the Labour Party had used antisemitic language, and in doing so they had put the moral survival of their nation at risk. But when the president of the United States won millions of people both in his country and beyond its borders to antisemitism that harm was worth no more than a coded and passing rebuke. A week before the 2020 presidential election, the Board of Deputies of British Jews’ Twitter account posted that “the US elections results matter all around the world”. Trump, they wrote, “Has not sufficiently disavowed white supremacists; but abroad he has increased peace in the Middle East by bringing about the Abraham Accords”.49 The latter put relationships between Israel and the United Arab Emirates on an ordinary diplomatic footing. Presented with what was an everyday phenomenon in our times –​the aggressive antisemite who volubly loves Israel –​the Board of Deputies could not process those politics nor criticise them. The kindest verdict is that of Rivkah Brown, editor of the Jewish website Vashti Media, who wrote, “By focusing almost exclusively on antisemitism within Labour, British Jewish leaders have blinkered their flock to the broader catalysts of global antisemitism”.50

Trump and his British allies A modest but real part in Donald Trump’s 2016 breakthrough had been secured by events in Britain, whose vote to leave the EU, was used by Trump as a sign that the world was turning in the direction of nationalist politics. In the days before the referendum, the pro-​Trump website Breitbart published numerous updates on the British vote, reproducing Nigel Farage’s articles from the British tabloids. On the news of the Leave victory, Donald Trump tweeted, “Many people are equating Brexit and what is going on in Great Britain, with what is happening in the U.S. People want their country back!”Three days later he wrote, “I called Brexit (Hillary was wrong), watch November”. Over the subsequent weeks,Trump insisted that he represented “Brexit plus, plus, plus”. Within a week of appointing Breitbart’s Steve Bannon as his campaign manager in August 2016, Donald Trump invited Nigel Farage to join him in addressing a meeting in Jackson, Mississippi. Trump told his supporters, I was very supportive of their right to do it and to take control of their own future, like we’re going to be voting for on November 8th. They voted to reclaim control over immigration, over their economy, over their government. Trump tweeted, “They will soon be calling me Mr. Brexit”.51 Nigel Farage was plainly the lesser figure in his relationship with Donald Trump. The former leader of UKIP did not have the multi-million Twitter following52 of Donald Trump; neither did he have the authority of Trump’s elected office. All that

86  Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right

acknowledged, he too has repeatedly employed language shaped by anti-​Jewish myths. In a series of interviews conducted between 2009 and 2019 on right-​wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars’ show, Farage insisted that there existed a secret global conspiracy run through the annual Bilderberg gatherings of political and business leaders, and that “globalists” sought to engineer a world war as part of a plan to impose a worldwide government.53 In June 2017, on Fox News, Farage claimed that George Soros (the focus of so much antisemitic intrigue) was, in his words, “the biggest danger to the entire western world”.54 In an interview for Revelation TV in 2019, Farage endorsed the “New World Order” conspiracy theory which has been repeatedly linked to antisemitism.55 Given this track record, you might expect that Farage and his supporters be subjected to criticism comparable to that directed at Labour. Far from it, in June 2013, Farage was invited to speak at a Jewish Chronicle gathering, an event promoted in the following terms. “Nigel Farage has expressed his admiration for the Jewish community in Britain, describing it as ‘an example to us all’ ”, the readers of the Jewish Chronicle were told.56 On stage, the newspaper’s editor Stephen Pollard observed that any number of UKIP members had crossed the line into open antisemitism. He asked, Farage, “There is a pattern, isn’t there?” “Have we been caused embarrassment by some people?” Farage replied, “The answer is yes”.57 He was then allowed to speak at length boasting that UKIP excluded former members of the British National Party (BNP) from membership. Stephen Pollard has, on other occasions, criticised Farage.58 But, in 2013, he chose not to ask the obvious follow-​up question: What about the former members who left UKIP? After all, as recently as 2008, the membership lists of the BNP held twice as many former members of a relatively small party UKIP as they did former member of the much larger Conservatives.59 Didn’t that history show that racists had flitted between the two parties? The question was not asked and could not have been, not when Farage’s talk had been billed as a meeting of friends. It is worth comparing the deference shown to Trump and to Trump’s British allies to the approach, for example, of Kenneth Stern, the former director on antisemitism for the American Jewish Committee and drafter of the IHRA definition. Trump’s election was, Stern urged, the moment when people needed to speak out: Recall that [Trump’s] campaign attitudes were tinged with antisemite images and that he continues to use stereotypes about Jews and money. Recall that he had kind words for participants at the Charlottesville rally despite their Nazi flags.60 Trump and his administrators were dividing Americans by race, ethnicity, and religion: Historically, when leaders gain support by pointing to enemies within, antisemitism is likely to increase, even flourish. Jewish groups instinctively know

Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right  87

this. But when the person creating the danger is seen as the most pro-​Israel president in recent memory, he seemingly gets a pass on antisemitism.61 Although Stern’s remarks were directed to the leaders of American communal organisations, they apply with equal force to the leaders of Jewish communal organisations in Britain.

Notes 1 D. Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London: Pluto Press, 2019; Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket, 2019), pp. 129–​170. 2 Anti-​Defamation League, Antisemitic Targeting of Journalists during the 2016 Presidential Campaign, a Report from ADL’s Task Force on Harassment and Journalism (New York: ADL, 2016), p. 6. 3 ADL, Antisemitic Targeting, p. 6; Anti-​Defamation League, Quantifying Hate: A Year of Antisemitism on Twitter (NewYork:ADL, 2018), p. 2; JewishVoice for Peace, On Antisemitism (Chicago: JVP, 2017), pp. 88–​89. 4 M. H. Ribeiro, ‘Auditing Radicalisation Pathways on YouTube,’ Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, January 2020. 5 ‘K. Long, College Students Erect “Trump Wall” at University of Washington,’ Seattle Times, 9 May 2016. 6 ‘ “10,000 of Us Can Be James Allsup”: White Nationalists Are Getting Involved in Local GOP Politics,’ Southern Poverty Law Centre, 28 August 2018. 7 James Allsup, ‘YouTube,’ 21 August 2019, archive.today. 8 T. Lavin, Culture Warriors: My Journey to the Dark Web of White Supremacy (London: Monoray, 2020), p. 40. 9 Lavin, Culture Warriors, p. 40. 10 I. Lovett, ‘Rise in Antisemitic Incidents Goes Beyond Recent Violent Attacks,’ Wall Street Journal, 17 December 2019. 11 Hunton and Williams LLP, Final Report: Independent Review of the Events in Charlottesville, Virginia (Richmond: Hunton and Williams, 2017). 12 B. Jacobs and O. Laughland, ‘Charlottesville: Trump Reverts to Blaming Both Sides Including “Violent Alt-​left”,’ Guardian, 16 August 2017. 13 D. Cole, ‘House Majority Leader Deletes Tweet Saying Soros, Bloomberg, Steyer Are Trying to “Buy” Elections,’ Slate, 28 October 2018. 14 M. Papenfuss, ‘Fox Business Slams GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert for Anti-​Soros Screed –​ On Fox Business,’ Huffpost, 7 December 2018. 15 T. Gabriel, ‘Before Trump, Steve King Set the Agenda for the Wall and Anti-​Immigrant Politics,’ New York Times, 10 January 2019; A. Blake, ‘Reps. Steve King, Paul Gosar Boost Conspiracy Theory That Whistle-​Blower Is Son of George Soros,’ Washington Times,’ 15 November 2019. 16 E. Reeve, ‘Congressman Suggests Charlottesville Was George Soros–​Backed Conspiracy,’ Vice, 5 October 2017. 17 L. Aratani, ‘Jewish Groups Criticize Trump for Antisemitic Stereotypes in Speech,’ Guardian, 9 December 2019; M. Charen, ‘If Donald Trump Loves Jews So Much, Why Does He Keep Celebrating America’s Biggest Antisemites?’ Haaretz, 25 February 2020. 18 B. Sales, ‘Senator’s Speech on “Cosmopolitan Elites”,’ Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 24 July 2019.

88  Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right

19 Sales, ‘Senator’s Speech.’ 20 Sales, ‘Senator’s Speech.’ 21 Sales, ‘Sentor’s Speech.’ 22 D. Feldman, ‘Toward a History of the Term “Antisemitism”,’ American Historical Review 123/​4 (2018), pp. 1139–​1150. 23 ‘Theresa May’s Conference Speech,’ Spectator, 5 October 2016; A. Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 199. 24 ‘Theresa May’s Conference Speech.’ 25 A. LeBor, ‘It Is Not Antisemitic to Ask Questions about George Soros,’ Times, 8 October 2019; and Chapter 1. 26 ‘On the Referendum #34: Batsignal!! Don’t Let Corbyn-​Sturgeon Cheat a Second Referendum with Millions of Foreign Votes,’ dominiccummings.com, 27 November 2019; and Chapter 1. 27 L. Harpin, ‘Tory Party Accused of “Inaction” over Antisemitism Investigation into MPs,’ Jewish Chronicle, 13 July 2020; and Chapter 1. 28 P. Embery, Despised:Why the Modern Left Loathes theWorking Class (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). 29 B. Levin, ‘Trump Goes Full Antisemite in Room Full of Jewish People,’ Vanity Fair, 9 December 2019. 30 Levin, ‘Trump Goes Full Antisemite.’ 31 Levin, ‘Trump Goes Full Antisemite.’ 32 Levin, ‘Trump Goes Full Antisemite.’ 33 The beliefs of different strands of Christian Zionists, and their contribution to the foundation of a Jewish state in Israel, are explored in P. Alexander, ‘The Church and the Hermeneutical Challenge of Political Zionism,’ Ex Auditu 39 (2019), pp. 1–​32; and S. Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 145–​150. 34 11: 25–​26. 35 J. S. Robbins, ‘Synagogue Shooter Hated Donald Trump and Shows What Real Hatred, Antisemitism Looks Like,’ USA Today, 29 October 2018. 36 Lovett, ‘Rise in Antisemitic Incidents.’ 37 T. Cleary, ‘John Earnest: 5 Facts You Need to Know,’ Heavy, 29 April 2019. For a discussion of Trump’s relationship in first emboldening and then disappointing a generation of white supremacists, Lavin, Culture Warriors, pp. 55–​57. 38 ‘David Anderson: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,’ Heavy, 12 December 2019. 39 J. Zauzmer, ‘The Alleged Synagogue Shooter Was a Churchgoer Who Talked Christian Theology, Raising Tough Questions for Evangelical Pastors,’ Washington Post, 1 May 2019. 40 D. Hirsh, ‘The EHRC Ruling Has Re-​stated The Livingstone Formulation in the Language of UK Equality Law,’ Engage, 30 October 2020. 41 S. Burley, ‘Antisemitism in the White House: Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump and the Alt-​Right,’ Truthout, 20 November 2016. 42 ‘Latest Trump Ad Contains Prominent Jews in Positions of “Global Power”,’ Jerusalem Post, 7 November 2016. 43 E. Cohen, ‘On the Dangers of Fighting Antisemitism,’ Medium, 23 September 2020. 44 Cohen, ‘On the Dangers.’ 45 D. Sugarman,‘Chief Rabbi SlamsTrump as “a Racist”,’ Jewish Chronicle, 10 November 2016. 46 Sugarman, ‘Chief Rabbi Slams Trump.’ 47 ‘U.K. Chief Rabbi: Deceptive Populists Present Us with a False Choice,’ Newsweek, 2 October 2017. 48 ‘U.K. Chief Rabbi: Deceptive Populists.’ 49 @boardofdeputies, Twitter, 29 October 2020. Accessed 30 October 2020.

Seeing no evil: Trump and the US right  89

50 R. Brown, ‘The Antisemitic Monster Rising from the Slime Is Not Corbynism –​It Is White Nationalism,’ Independent, 31 December 2019. 51 @realdonaldTrump, Twitter, 24 June 2016, 27 June 2016, 18 August 2016; D. Kellner, American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascent of Donald J. Trump (Rotterdam: Sense, 2017), p. 42; J. Diamond, ‘Trump Gets Boost from Brexit Leader Farage as He Aims for “American Independence”,’ CNN, 25 August 2018. 52 As of 28 November 2020. 53 P. Walker, ‘Nigel Farage under Fire over Antisemitic Tropes on Far-​Right US Talkshow,’ Guardian, 6 May 2019. 54 ‘Nigel Farage,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 4 December 2019. 55 ‘Nigel Farage Accused of Perpetuating Conspiracy Theories Linked to Antisemitism,’ Jewish Chronicle, 22 November 2019. 56 ‘Farage Set to Debate with JC Readers,’ Jewish Chronicle, 4 July 2013. 57 ‘The Jewish Chronicle Interviews Nigel Farage of UKIP,’ YouTube, 12 July 2013. 58 He was quoted for example criticising Farage in J. Stevens, ‘Farage Accused of Driving Jews from Britain after Ukip Pledge to Ban Religious Slaughter of Animals,’ Daily Mail, 3 February 2015. 59 ‘British National Party Membership and Contacts List, Spread Sheet, 2007–​2008,’ Wikileaks. Accessed 7 June 2018. 60 K. S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict:The Israel/​Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: New Jewish Press, 2020), p. 171. 61 Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict, p. 171.

7 SEEING NO EVIL Corbyn and the Mear One mural

One step taken by Corbyn to limit the damage done to his leadership by accusations of antisemitism was to ask Shami Chakrabarti in April 2016 to conduct an inquiry into antisemitism within Labour. Potentially, this could have been a breakthrough. Chakrabarti had a great deal of moral authority because of the 13 years she had served as director of the civil rights campaign, Liberty. She found that Labour was “not overrun by antisemitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism”, but acknowledged “clear evidence (going back some years) of minority hateful or ignorant attitudes and behaviours ... I have heard too many Jewish voices express concern that antisemitism has not been taken seriously enough in the Labour Party and broader Left”.1 Her report was also accompanied by a second, more narrowly focussed investigation, looking at events in OULC. The author was Baroness Royall, once a special adviser to Neil Kinnock. Royall found that: There have been some incidents of antisemitic behaviour and that it is appropriate for the disciplinary procedures of our Party to be invoked. However, it is not clear to me to what extent this behaviour constituted intentional or deliberate acts of antisemitism.2 Most allegations, she felt, required training rather than disciplinary sanction: Whilst I want to see the Party deal with acts of antisemitism, I see no value in pursuing disciplinary cases against students who may be better advised as to their conduct and who would benefit from training on these issues.3 The Chakrabarti Inquiry ranged wider than Royall’s, and its final sections included proposals for the tackling of antisemitic and other racist incidents, including a series of amendments to the Labour Party’s membership and disciplinary rules.

Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural  91

At the date of writing (December 2020), several of the reforms proposed by Chakrabarti remain to be implemented. Some make good sense and would improve Labour’s processes. For example, the report proposed that there should be a limitation on the investigation of historic allegations. If disciplinary proceedings were based on a breach of the criminal law (including electoral law), there should be no limitation period. Where however they related to “uncomradely conduct and language” then only in exceptional circumstances should those be investigated if the underlying misconduct was more than two years old.4 Such a reform would have brought Labour’s procedure in line with comparable civil hearings: our main discrimination court is the Employment Tribunal where the time limit is much shorter at just three months. For minor criminal cases heard in the Magistrates’ Court there is a six-​month time limit. Others were less practical. Chakrabarti proposed the formation of a standing panel of senior lawyers who would serve as volunteers assisting NEC members with decisions. Appointment to that panel would be open to lawyers who had been in practice for 15 years.5 This sounded sensible but set the standard artificially high. Most judicial appointments require candidates to have been lawyers in practice for just five or seven years. To say that before assisting a Labour Party panel, a lawyer would need twice as much experience as a County Court judge was to inflate the importance of the panels and the complexity of the task in front of them. It was to fall into the trap of thinking that the panels made bad decisions because they lacked technical expertise, when what they lacked was rather the political good sense to do right without deferring to factional interest. The report was published on 30 June 2016. Unfortunately, just five weeks later the news broke that the author had been nominated by Labour for a peerage. The Board of Deputies of British Jews complained understandably of a “whitewash for peerages”.6 At the Home Affairs Select Committee in summer 2016, Ephraim Mirvis gave a mixed welcome to the findings of the Chakrabarti Inquiry. There were some positive features of the report and he was also disappointed about certain elements of it. The parts he welcomed were: [A]‌call for the end of the usage of abusive terminology such as “Paki” and “Zio”, a call for the end of ethnic stereotyping and a call for the end of references to the Holocaust, Nazis, and Hitler when it comes to debates relating to Israel and the Middle East.7 Mirvis did go on to set out his reservations with Chakrabarti inquiry; for example, he criticised the report’s suggestion that there should be a limitation period which would prevent the dredging up of old allegations of antisemitism. “What is wrong is wrong”, Mirvis countered,“regardless of whether it is contemporary or historical”.8 In addition to the timing of the announcement of Chakrabarti elevation to the peerage, there was one further incident which overtook what otherwise might have been the positive treatment of her report. Its June 2016 launch was attended

92  Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural

by Marc Wadsworth, a long-​standing campaigner for racial justice. At the event, Wadsworth handed a leaflet setting out his group’s position to Kate McCann, a journalist at the Daily Telegraph. McCann then passed it on to Ruth Smeeth, a Jewish MP on the right of that party.Wadsworth saw this is a hostile act –​the Labour right and the press in cahoots. He heckled Chakrabarti for not taking questions from black journalists, and asked a question of his own, “I saw that the Telegraph handed a copy of the press release to Ruth Smeeth MP, and you can see who’s working hand in hand”.9 Smeeth left the hall in tears, and complained, saying that in invoking the idea of Jews and the press working together in secret, Wadsworth was invoking antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish conspiracy.10 Wadsworth insisted that he had not known of Smeeth’s identity before speaking.11 The least that can be said about the incident is that it was a complete misreading of the situation on Wadsworth’s part. If he thought that he could counter-​attack against undemocratic manoeuvring by the Labour right, he should not have used an event intended to prove Labour’s commitment to fighting antisemitism to attack a Jewish MP.12 In autumn 2016, Corbyn fought a second leadership contest within the Labour Party. He won again.The issue around which Corbyn’s critics rallied was what they saw as his inadequate support for Remain in the EU referendum. According to Ann Coffey MP, one of the two signatories to a motion of no confidence in Corbyn, Corbyn had run a “lacklustre campaign, it didn’t contain a strong enough message, and the leader himself appeared half-​hearted about it”.13 According to another critic, Phil Wilson, who chaired the “Labour In” parliamentary group, “Jeremy was only ever partially interested in keeping Britain in Europe”.14 That argument engaged a minority of Labour supporters, but not a large enough one to determine the leadership election. Corbyn continued to have both the active support of many new Labour Party members and the passive support of a middle ground who felt, simply, that any challenge was premature. He won re-​election comfortably. In 2017, Corbyn had enjoyed the boost of success in a general election. It is worth recalling quite how few people expected Labour to go into that election and win seats. Labour went into the contest 20 points behind in the polls, and activists’ feeling of doubts are well conveyed by the title of one crowdfunder, “Stop the Tory landslide”.15 In the words of Richard Seymour, “Jeremy Corbyn was the traduced laughing-​stock leader of a broken and divided opposition, scolded by the liberal press, hounded by the right-​wing press, condescended by the broadcasters”.16 Corbyn also faced further institutional barrier that parts of his own apparatus were hoping for a Conservative victory, and as large as possible, so as to clear the ground for what the staffers hoped would be a purge of the left. “Death by fire is too kind for LOTO [the leader’s office]”, wrote one staffer three weeks into the election campaign.When polls predicted a narrowing of the Conservative majority, another staff member complained, “I actually felt quite sick”. “Everyone had to be ready”, others insisted, hinting at the promised purge, “It has to be clean and brutal”. A poll on election night predicting a Conservative 12-​point lead received

Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural  93

the celebratory response, “Boom”. News that Labour would hold a final election rally in Islington was met with the responses, “Truncheons out lads” and “Water cannons please”.17 Yet in the 2017 election, 30 seats fell to Labour, including Enfield Southgate, Warwick and Leamington, Ipswich, Peterborough, and Reading East. Corbyn’s Labour, writes Seymour, was “making gains of the sort that it would only normally make if it was winning the election”.18 When parliamentary politics resumed, following the general election, Corbyn was in the ascendant, authoritative, and confident range, while his opponent Theresa May was downcast. However, in the 12 months that followed this election, the enthusiasm for Corbyn slowly dissipated. Labour remained stuck where it was in the polls, while the Conservatives found an increasing number of issues through which to counterattack. One was the allegation that the 2017 Labour Party conference had witnessed repeated antisemitic incidents. In the main hall: Corbyn’s main conference speech pledged “real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-​year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-​state solution of the Israel-​Palestine conflict”. It was also complained that one organisation JLM had been treated harshly. The context was that a rule change on how discrimination complaints would be investigated had been negotiated between Labour’s NEC and the JLM. That motion passed. Before it did, Naomi Wimborne-​Idrissi, a prominent Jewish member of the party, and a supporter of Palestinian rights, complained that the JLM would have more credibility if that “organisation did not spend so much of its time running to the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph with stories”. Many delegates applauded. Wimborne-​Idrissi’s words echoed Wadsworth’s a year earlier. Outside the conference, they were widely denounced. Members of the JLM, the Jewish Leadership council, Ruth Smeeth MP, and the editorial writers of the Daily Telegraph accused her of employing “an antisemitic trope”.19 But, as one Corbyn supporter Jamie Stern-​Weiner observed, “Antisemitic propaganda has traditionally depicted Jews as owning the media, not briefing it”.20 The most contentious event was a talk given by Miko Peled, a former Israeli red beret who became a peace activist and now lives in the United States. In response to a question from the floor, Peled insisted that free speech entitled views critical of Israel to be heard. He did so using language which would make sense to any American listener shaped by that country’s First Amendment tradition, for which the defining campaign in favour of free expression was the willingness of a group of Jewish lawyers employed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), at Skokie in 1977, to go to court in order to insist on the right of Nazis to demonstrate.21 Speaking in the context of that tradition, and on the assumption that a British audience would echo its belief in free speech for fascists, Peled defended the rights of anti-​Zionist Jews to speak: This is about free speech. It’s about the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, whether it’s Palestine, the

94  Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural

liberation, I mean, the entire spectrum. There should be no limits on the discussion. Mike Peled was not denying the Holocaust. He was rather seeking to draw on what he wrongly assumed would be a shared political discourse in which any views, no matter how polarising or annoying they were, would be protected by law and immune from legal sanction. He badly misread his audience –​in the conference and above all outside. To any English audience, the idea of the necessity of free speech for fascists is no given. For while, in 1977, the ACLU was demanding free speech for fascists, in Britain we had the Anti-​Nazi League,22 a campaign in which many left-​wing Jews participated,23 opposing free speech for fascists. Our domestic law of free speech, as reflected in article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights and in the Human Rights Act, makes speech a qualified and not an absolute good. We are taught to encourage free expression, but only up to a boundary point –​when the speech promotes violence or uses discriminatory language.24 In a televised interview, BBC News anchor Jo Coburn, apparently under the belief that Peled had used the occasion to deny the truth of the Holocaust, put to left-​wing filmmaker Ken Loach that he should condemn Peled’s talk. Loach began by saying he did not believe there had been any discussion of the Holocaust at the meeting. He then said: I think history is for us all to discuss, wouldn’t you? … [A]‌ll history is our common heritage to discuss and analyse. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss. The role of Israel is there for us to discuss.25 This answer was unlikely to appease anyone listening from outside the Corbyn milieu. Part of its fault was the way in which Loach pivoted from a discussion of the Holocaust to the politics of present-​day Israel. For there is no good reason why the answer to the question “Should Holocaust deniers be allowed to speak?” could be “ethnic cleansing” in “the state of Israel”, unless Loach meant to put a whole series of logical steps in between. In the few seconds available to Loach, he had no time to explain what they were or defend them. Suddenly the clip was being shared everywhere online, as if the Labour Party conference had produced not one but two participants willing to treat the Holocaust as just another subject open to discussion. For people who were at the centre of Labour’s antisemitism crisis, it felt as if they were in the middle of a war, with a constant stream of allegations being made. Part of the problem moreover was that these complaints were of such a varied quality. To take just the example of the 2017 conference, it was said that Corbyn had been wrong to support the Palestinians. He was criticised for calling for a two-​state solution when this has been Israeli policy for nearly 30 years. It was suggested (not least by Jo Coburn) that Labour had hosted an event at which a Holocaust denier spoke –​but this was untrue, the allegation took a poorly phrased defence of free

Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural  95

speech rights and turned it into something grotesque, an apology for murder. It was also said that Ken Loach had spoken about the Holocaust as if to deny its historical truth –​again, treating a poorly phrased defence of free speech as if it were something different from what it had been. There was a fast-​moving discussion in which the Sun and the websites of the Times, Telegraph, Mail, and Express ran more than 30 separate articles in six days (and in which countless other news sources also reported about them). One Sun columnist Tony Parsons told his readers that “Labour seethes with an abundance of wild-​eyed, mouth-​foaming hatreds”,26 while Stephen Pollard said that Labour “was now the party of bigots and thugs”.27 The defences of the left made by Peled and Loach had stumbled and been inept, but they did not justify the campaign of abuse that was directed at them.

Conspiracies, Jewish, and otherwise The most important step in the re-​emergence of Labour antisemitism crisis was the re-​discovery that, several years before, Corbyn had supported an artist Mear One (Kalen Ockerman) after his mural was effaced for its antisemitic associations. The story was published in the Jewish Chronicle in 2015, eight weeks after Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party,28 but received little notice. It became, however, a matter of public outcry in spring 2018 and was an important step in the process of discrediting Corbyn and making him seem an apologist for antisemitism. In October 2012, the Docklands & East London Advertiser reported the story that a Conservative councillor in Tower Hamlets had objected to a recently painted mural. “I am horrified at this mural”, Peter Golds told reporters. “It bears a similarity to antisemitic propaganda in pre-​war Germany. As well as the anti-​Jewish overtones, there is even the quasi-​Masonic and dollar bill aspect to encourage conspiracy theory”.29 The mural was a painting of six middle aged white men playing a game not very different from Monopoly, save that the table on which it had been constructed was made out of the bodies of four enslaved black men. Behind them was a large image of a pyramid, its top floating free from its base, while to the side there were images of smoking factory chimney (presumably representing the economy) and within it a clockwork wheel (presumably, finance). On the far left-​ hand side of the image, a protester held a placard, “The New World Order is the Enemy of Humanity”. Was it reasonable for Golds to assume that the six middle aged men were Jews? As we shall see, the artist insisted that he had not intended to paint an antisemitic mural. He claimed that a few, not all of the men were intended to be Jews. Focussing simply on the men, Mear drew at least two of them with outsized noses, in accordance with a long-​standing myth that Jews are recognisable by their large noses and lips. Moreover, this was not the only way in which the image connected to old fantasies. One of the two bankers flaunted his wealth by counting his money. In antisemitic stereotype, Jews are a world power, who use their control of finance to dominate the economy, meeting in secret gatherings, such as the

96  Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural

occasion in which it was claimed that the classic Jewish conspiracy (and antisemitic forgery) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been drawn up. The mural gave physical expression to these stereotypes, through the way in which the wheels of finance were shown as turning the mechanism of the industrial economy, and through the drawing of six white men in a secret gathering. Then there was the racial identity of the black bodies that were hunched beneath the Monopoly board. Naked, they were painted like the slaves of antisemitic myth –​shipped from Africa to America on the order of the Jews. Even the term “New World Order” has been repeatedly employed by the far right, by the likes of Pat Robertson30 and Alex Jones.31 In 2012, Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman instructed his staff to paint the image over: “Whether intentional or otherwise, the images of the bankers perpetuate antisemitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial and political institutions”.32 Mear One complained on Facebook about the destruction of his mural, attaching a photo of it. In his words, “Tomorrow they want to buff my mural. Freedom of Expression. London Calling. Public Art”.33 Various figures on the left responded to his post, including the Muslim anti-​war activist Yvonne Ridley (“It’s very moving and a wonderful piece of art –​what’s wrong with it?”).34 Directly below her, Corbyn also commented, telling the artist: Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [Rockefeller] destroyed Diego Viera [Rivera]’s mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.35 In March 2018, Corbyn insisted that he had looked at the mural only briefly before posting.“I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on, the contents of which are deeply disturbing and antisemitic”.36 The fact that in 2012 he managed to misspell two names in 20 words suggests that he was telling the truth. Indeed, it is also a matter of choice as to whether the important sentence in his comment was the first one: “why?” (in other words, asking for more information about the mural), or the second sentence, “You are in good company” which seemed to validate Mear One’s work. The author of the 2015 Jewish Chronicle piece reporting on this exchange, Marcus Dysch, appears to have believed that Corbyn’s response was ambiguous. His piece did not accuse the Labour leader of antisemitism, but rather asked the question:“Did Jeremy Corbyn back artist whose mural was condemned as antisemitic?”37 When the mural returned to public discussion in 2018, the best that could have been hoped was that the Labour Party, Corbyn, and his left-​wing supporters would unite in a quick and frank admission that the mural was indeed antisemitic. Even if he had not done so in 2012, Corbyn could still have acknowledged that reality when the story made it to the front pages in 2018. Instead, the problems began in the leadership’s office, where those closest to Corbyn were divided as to how to respond. Laura Murray, Corbyn’s stakeholder manager, had been due to meet representatives of the JLM the very afternoon the story broke and was shocked by the image. Members of Corbyn’s communications team infuriated her

Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural  97

by putting out early version of the statement which expressed neither apology nor regret for his actions. “In 2012, Jeremy was responding to concerns about the removal of public art on the grounds of free speech. However, the mural was offensive, used antisemitic imagery which has no place in our society, and it is right that it was removed”. Members of the team had to be persuaded to reissue and toughen the statement.38 It needed to be reissued three times before it struck the right tone.39 One reason the controversy dragged on was the response of Corbyn supporters, including a vocal online minority who shared any source, no matter how poorly reasoned, so long as it exonerated Corbyn. In contrast to Corbyn himself in 2012, those defending him in 2018 had all sorts of advantages. They had time to study at the image before posting. His remarks had been rushed and thoughtless, theirs did not need to be actively damaging. Several of Corbyn’s online supporters sought to brazen the crisis out, reasoning that this battle could be won only by finding some previously unconsidered justification for Corbyn’s mistake. So, for example, Evolve Politics found a pro-​Jewish social media account which was trying to change the subject from the mural to Corbyn’s previous acts in support of Jewish people. This was reported as, “The Jewish Voice Twitter Account is absolutely DESTROYING the media’s latest Corbyn antisemitism smear”.40 The Skwawkbox website argued that if several BBC journalists saw a group of men with hook-​nosed, and inferred that they were Jewish, this proved that the broadcaster, and not the artist or Corbyn, were the true antisemites. “The BBC made a lazy, casually antisemitic and fundamentally incorrect assumption about the content of the mural”.41 “Honest people”, insists Karl Sabbagh, author of the pro-​Corbyn book, The Antisemitism Wars, “could differ as to whether the mural was antisemitic or anti-​ Masonic”.42 No: the message of the mural was antisemitic. Moreover, it is possible for an image to be offensive in more than one way. Offence is not a zero-​sum game. Another left-​wing website, The Communists, took the step of quoting from an interview with Mear One in which he had addressed the charges of antisemitism. The artist set the mural in the context of his own life, explaining why he had painted it: “I had just gone through the cypher of Occupy LA 2011, all the way to its violent end the night the [Los Angeles Police Department] rolled through to dismantle the protest”.43 Mear accepted that two of the six central figures were indeed Jewish, but said that four were not. Rather, he had intended them to represent non-​Jewish people: “Rockefeller [a Baptist], Morgan [an Episcopalian], Carnegie [a Presbyterian] … as well [as] Aleister Crowley”.44 While Mear One denied that his mural was intended to be antisemitic, he did not do so consistently. On another occasion, he said: “Some of the older white Jewish folk in the local community had an issue with me portraying their beloved #Rothschild or #Warburg etc. as the demons they are”.45 The slur is in that word their: Rothschild was a banker, and a Jew. If he did anything wrong –​then all other Jews were jumbled up in his wrongdoing.

98  Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural

On the basis of Mear One’s interview, The Communists concluded that Corbyn’s critics were liars. “The Zionists are playing a dangerous game when they conflate anti-​ Zionism and condemnation of Israel with antisemitism…”46 “The Zionists” –​ really? Because the subject of the mural was not Israel or Palestine. The image expressed old-​style anti-​Jewish racism. Moreover, the Communists failed to explain that the interview they were quoting was not between them and Mear One. Rather, they had taken it from the website of the conspiracy theorist David Icke, the former footballer and sports broadcaster who believes that the world is controlled by a secret conspiracy which he calls “the Death Cult”. In his books, the Russian Revolution was the work of “Zionist (Rothschild) dominance”, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion “have happened or are happening”, Hitler’s path to power was eased by Jewish bankers to justify “the establishment of Israel”, and 9/​11 was the work of “the Israel ultra-​Zionist network”.47 “I thank David Icke and Gareth Icke and their team”, Mear One wrote, “for allowing me this opportunity to offer my side of the story, uncut and uncensored, for those who are awoken”.48 He denied that he had been motivated by racism (“I have never said anything about these characters representing anything more than greedy old European and American men in power”).49 The Communists was not a mainstream Labour source –​it is the website of a tiny left-​wing group (CPGB-​ML). The problem was that a wider set of people needed something to grasp onto in order to portray Corbyn as the victim. Such pieces were read and shared beyond their normal audience and reinforced a much broader sense that Corbyn was being unfairly treated. An article by Jonathan Cook, the Palestine-​ based journalist, which was republished by both Jewish Voice for Labour and Labour Briefing employed a version of the same argument, insisting that the mural could not be considered racist if its author denied that it was. The artist himself, Kalen Ockerman, has said that the group in his mural comprised historical figures associated with banking. His mural, he says, was about “class and privilege”, and the figures depicted included both “Jewish and white Anglos”. The fact that he included famous bankers, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, does not on the face of it seem to be proof of antisemitism.50 Writing in Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley cited Mear One’s denial that the mural was antisemitic.Winstanley chose to address the question (which no one else was asking) of whether Mear One had been right to treat the Rothschild family as supporters of Zionism: In the late 19th century, some leading members of the Rothschild banking family financially supported early Zionist colonisation of Palestine. Indeed, the infamous Balfour Declaration –​which announced the British Empire’s

Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural  99

intent to hand Palestine over to colonisation by the Zionist movement –​was addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild.51 But Zionism, Winstanley went on to explain, could not be reduced to such manoeuvres. It was also the product of British imperialism and Christian Zionists. A majority of prominent British Jews had opposed Zionism even in the period of the Rothschilds’ greatest influence. British and American anti-​Jewish and right-​wing conspiracy theorists ignore these facts and regularly cite the Rothschilds’ role in Palestine as part of their claims asserting secretive “Rothschild” control over the world. Palestinians have repeatedly made clear that they want such conspiracy theorists to have no part in their struggle.52 Winstanley was right to say that prominent Palestinians have repeatedly denounced antisemitism and fought the argument that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should be blamed on the malevolence of “the Jews”. In 1998, for example, and in the dying days of the Oslo peace process, Edward Said wrote a piece for the pan-​Arab newspaper Al-​Hayat, saying, “We must deal with those who recognise our rights”. The Palestinian cause, he insisted, was one of fighting apartheid and racial discrimination. From that perspective he warned against an “invidious nationalism” that emerged from moments of Palestinian defeat. He spoke of “outmoded and discredited ideas”, which held the cause back, including “the notion that the Jews never suffered, and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection”. He asked, “Why do we expect the world to believe our sufferings as Arabs if we cannot recognise the suffering of others?”53 Yet everything else about Winstanley’s piece was the wrong way round. There were more than 20 paragraphs of context before it mentioned the source of Labour’s current controversy, Corbyn’s remarks about the mural. It ended where it should have begun: with the rejection of antisemitism. In emphasising the record of complicity of the Rothschild family in the pre-​1917 its author seemed to be saying that if the conspiracy theories had since become false, they had once, in decades past, been true. Moreover, what Electronic Intifada chose not to mention was almost as important as what it did. At no stage did the piece say clearly that the mural was antisemitic, or that Corbyn had been wrong to have supported it. One Corbyn supporter Richard Seymour wrote, “Mear One’s mural was antisemitic. If Trump posted an image of that mural on his Twitter feed, it would immediately be recognised for what it is”.54 Another left-​wing journalist Michael Segalov told the readers of the Guardian that many members of the Labour Party “do not understand the content of this mural and why it is so deeply offensive”. He invited his readers to study the mural carefully. Piece by piece he explained how the various antisemitic messages fitted together.55 Corbyn himself attempted to repair the damage, writing on 26 March 2018 his fullest account of the antisemitism crisis and of his own part in it. On the

100  Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural

question of the mural, Corbyn acknowledged his own negligence in failing to spot its antisemitism: The idea of Jewish bankers and capitalists exploiting the workers of the world is an old antisemitic conspiracy theory. This was long ago, and rightly, described as “the socialism of fools.” I am sorry for not having studied the content of the mural more closely before wrongly questioning its removal in 2012.56 Corbyn admitted that antisemitism was present within his own Labour Party and criticised those (including himself) who had cast doubt on the scale of the problem: I recognise that antisemitism has surfaced within the Labour Party and has too often been dismissed as simply a matter of a few bad apples.57 He also went further than he ever had before in acknowledging the partial truths contained within the concept of the new antisemitism: “Newer forms of antisemitism”, he wrote, “have been woven into criticism of Israeli governments”.58 He continued: [C]‌omparing Israel or the actions of Israeli governments to the Nazis, attributing criticisms of Israel to Jewish characteristics or to Jewish people in general and using abusive phraseology about supporters of Israel such as “Zio” all constitute aspects of contemporary antisemitism.59 Corbyn concluded with words of affection for the people who had criticised him and warned of the dangers of antisemitism. “In this fight, I am your ally and always will be”.60 It was a reflective letter: honest and contrite.Yet part of Corbyn’s difficulty was the silence of those around him, and our shared failure to act on the promise of his letter to challenge antisemitism wherever it appeared. Although he accepted criticism, many Corbyn supporters refused to say anything. In keeping quiet, they allowed it to seem as if the likes of Electronic Intifada, JVL, or even The Communists were the majority of the left.

Notes 1 The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry (London: Labour Party, 2016), p. 1. 2 M. Dysch, ‘Baroness Royall Report Reveals Oxford Labour Students Engaged in Antisemitism,’ Jewish Chronicle, 3 August 2016. 3 Dysch, ‘Baroness Royall Report.’ 4 The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry, p. 20. 5 The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry, p. 19. 6 R. Mason, ‘Corbyn’s Offer of Peerage to Shami Chakrabarti Causes Labour Tensions,’ Guardian, 4 August 2016.

Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural  101

7 Home Affairs Committee, Oral Evidence: Antisemitism, HC 136, Thursday 14 July 2016. 8 Home Affairs Committee, Oral Evidence. 9 @EL4C, Twitter, 25 April 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 10 L. Brown, ‘Revealed: Activist Who Made Jewish MP Weep during Corbyn Meeting Seen Joking with the Labour Leader Moments Later,’ Daily Mail, 2 July 2016. 11 ‘Labour Antisemitism Row: Activist Expelled,’ LBC, 1 July 2016. 12 Francis Beckett and Mark Seddon note that Smeeth received copious antisemitic abuse online after this incident. They describe Wadsworth’s behaviour as “appalling”. However, they insist that it was not antisemitic. They asked Smeeth to explain why she believed Wadsworth was anti-​Jewish. Her communications manager replied that singling out a Jewish MP and accusing them of colluding with the media was an antisemitic trope. They write: “This doctrine means that if anyone accuses an MP who happens to be Jewish of collaborating with the media, it’s automatically antisemitism. This has to be dangerous, illiberal rubbish”. F. Beckett and M. Seddon, Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England (London: Biteback, 2018), p. 275. 13 Beckett and Seddon, Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth, p. 249. 14 A. Asthana, ‘Labour in for Britain Chair Criticises Jeremy Corbyn’s Campaign Involvement,’ Guardian, 26 June 2016. 15 O. Jones, This Land:The Struggle for the Left (London: Penguin, 2020), p. 131. 16 R. Seymour, Corbyn:The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (London:Verso, 2017 edn), p. x. 17 Jones, This Land, p. 135. 18 Seymour, Corbyn, p. x. 19 ‘Labour Conference or Nuremberg Rally.’ 20 ‘Labour Conference or Nuremberg Rally.’ 21 A. Neier, Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom of Speech (New York: International Debate Education Association, 2012 edn); P. Strum, When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1999); K. S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict:The Israel/​Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: New Jewish Press, 2020). 22 D. Renton, Never Again: Rock against Racism and the Anti-​ Nazi League 1976–​ 1982 (London: Routledge, 2018). 23 For Jewish participation in 1970s anti-​fascism, S. Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Other (London: Palgrave, 2014), p. 142. 24 Animal Defenders International, R (On the Application of) v Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport [2008] UKHL 15, para 27; Norwood v United Kingdom, ECHR application no. 23131/​03. 25 ‘Labour Conference or Nuremberg Rally.’ 26 T. Parsons, ‘Lab Labour Is Nasty, Spiteful and Thick… and Yet the Party Supposedly “Offers Hope” to Young Voters,’ The Sun, 30 September 2017. 27 S. Pollard, ‘Labour Is Now Run by Thugs and Dangerous Bigots,’ Express, 27 September 2017. 28 M. Dysch,‘Did Jeremy Corbyn Back Artist Whose Mural Was Condemned as Antisemitic?’ Jewish Chronicle, 6 November 2015. 29 ‘Fury over Brick Lane’s “Antisemitic” Mural,’ Docklands & East London Advertiser, 3 October 2012. 30 P. Robertson, The New World Order (New York: W, 1991). 31 The phrase provides the title for Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel’s film about Jones, New World Order (2015). 32 D. Finn, ‘The Corbyn Controversy,’ Le Monde diplomatique, June 2019.

102  Seeing no evil: Corbyn and Mear One mural

33 ‘Tom Watson Apologises over “Antisemitic” Mural Row,’ BBC News, 24 March 2018. 34 Dysch, ‘Did Jeremy Corbyn.’ 35 Dysch, ‘Did Jeremy Corbyn.’ Corbyn was referring to ‘Man at the Crossroads,’ a mural painted in 1933 by Diego Rivera for the lobby at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, and later plastered over on the orders of Nelson Rockefeller. 36 S. Pollard, ‘There Is Only One Word for Jeremy Corbyn,’ Jewish Chronicle, 24 March 2018. 37 Dysch, ‘Did Jeremy Corbyn.’ 38 Jones, This Land, p. 211; G. Pogrund and P. Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn (London: Bodley Head, 2020), p. 101. 39 L. Goodall, Left for Dead:The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party (London:William Collins, 2018), p. 204. 40 ‘The Jewish Voice Twitter Account Is Absolutely Destroying the Media’s Latest Corbyn Antisemitism Smear,’ Evolve Politics, 26 March 2018. 41 ‘Video: BBC Antisemitism with “Hook-​ Nosed Jews” Assumption,’ Skwawkbox, 26 March 2018. 42 K. Sabbagh, The Antisemitism Wars (Bloxham: Skyscraper, 2018), p. 32. 43 E. Rule, ‘The Infamous “Antisemitic” Mural,’ The Communists, 11 April 2018. 44 Rule, ‘The Infamous.’ 45 J. Neuberger, Antisemitism.What It Is.What It Isn’t.Why It Matters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), p. 115; B. Pitt, ‘Antisemitism, the Brick Lane Mural and the Stitch-​Up of Jeremy Corbyn,’ Medium, 31 May 2018. 46 Rule, ‘The Infamous.’ 47 D. Icke, The Trigger:The Lie that Changed the World (Cambridge: David Icke Books, 2019), pp. 607, 627, 629, 693; R. Charles, ‘A Hateful, Conspiracy-​Filled Book Just Got Harder to Buy. That’s No Cause for Celebration,’ Washington Post, 24 September 2019; also W. Offley, ‘David Icke and the Politics of Madness: Where the New Age Meets the Third Reich,’ PublicEye.Org, 29 February 2000. 48 ‘Exclusive to Davidicke.com: Street Artist Mear One Responds to “Antisemitic” Painting Hysteria,’ Davidicke.com, 27 March 2018. 49 ‘Exclusive to Davidicke.com.’ 50 Labour Briefing, 26 March 2018. 51 A. Winstanley, ‘Jewish Labour Activists Defend Corbyn as Israel Lobby Attacks,’ Electronic Intifada, 26 March 2018. 52 Winstanley, ‘Jewish Labour Activists.’ 53 E. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (London: Granta, 2000), pp. 282–​286. 54 R. Seymour, ‘Three Points about Antisemitism and the Left,’ Patreon, 27 March 2018. 55 M. Segalov, ‘If You Can’t See Antisemitism, It’s Time to Open Your Eyes,’ Guardian, 28 March 2018. 56 J. Corbyn, ‘ “I Will Always Be Your Ally in the Fight against Antisemitism” –​Corbyn’s Letter to Jewish leaders,’ LabourList, 26 March 2018. 57 Corbyn, ‘ “I Will Always”.’ 58 Corbyn, ‘ “I Will Always”.’ 59 Corbyn, ‘ “I Will Always”.’ 60 Corbyn, ‘ “I Will Always”.’

8 JEWDAS AND THE FIGURE OF THE BAD JEW

One of the rare moments of relief for the left in the long horror of the antisemitism crisis came in April 2018, that is, around a week after the mural had become a subject of fevered press discussion. Corbyn attended a “third night” Passover Seder held by Jewdas, a group of young Jewish leftists. (The idea of a Third Seder emerged in the 1920s and 1930s among Yiddish-​speaking migrants from eastern European, and their descendants. Many such Jews wanted to preserve vestiges of the major holy days that most of their grandparents had observed in Europe; and they sought ways to keep these customs going by reimagining them in secular and often irreligious terms).1 The supporters of Jewdas, it should be noted, were in most cases socialists, but they were by no means all members of the Labour party. Others identified with traditions to Labour’s left: anarchism or communism. That distinguished it from both the JLM, an organisation of between 1,000 and 2,000 people, many of whom were pro-​Israel or supported the Labour right, and JVL, a body founded in 2017 to support Corbyn and which had around 400 Jewish members2 during the events this book describes. In press accounts, Jewdas and JVL were assumed to be identical, but this was a misreading. JVL had been founded to defend Corbyn from accusations of antisemitism. Labour as a whole, JVL insisted, was providing no shelter to racists, “All the evidence shows this problem to be small, no worse than in the rest of society”. Most leading members of JVL had been active on the left for more than 40 years; they knew Corbyn, and he knew them. Two of the three members of Corbyn’s “kitchen cabinet” for dealing with the issue were in JVL.3 The problem in leaning on JVL to provide an objective view of the crisis was that no matter how bad the allegations were, it always found a way to excuse those who were criticised: each of Walker, Williamson, and Livingstone was defended by JVL.4

104  Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew

Jon Lansman was the most prominent Jewish figure in pro-​Corbyn circles. He had come into left politics through his rejection of antisemitism and had thought about the issues for years. “I was confident of navigating discussions about Israel, Palestine and Zionism without letting up on either opposing antisemitism or supporting Palestinian rights and statehood”.5 That confidence led him to criticise the instinct of denial on the left. “We’ve now got quite an aggressive group on the left, including within Momentum, of people who deny the problem, describe it as just a smear, as purely opportunistic”. Even Jews, he insisted, were capable of failing to see behaviour which had clearly crossed the line into antisemitism. Lansman continued, “If people are exposing a valid problem [of antisemitism], you have to deal with it. The motivation of the person exposing the problem is irrelevant”.6 At other times, he criticised JVL directly, warning Corbyn against relying exclusively on them, saying, “It is an organisation which is not just tiny but has no real connection with the Jewish community at all”. Such languages upset JVL supporters who told Owen Jones that it was “deeply disturbing”. They accused Lansman of writing them off as “the wrong kind of Jew”.7 In correspondence between Lansman and JVL, the founder of Momentum reminded the members of the group that he had emerged from the same milieu as them, had been a member of the Jewish Socialist Group (as were many supporters of JVL) and had actively supported Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JJP), which was another group from whom many supporters of JVL came. He told them, bluntly, that they were a part of the problem: The fact that JVL insists on defending those who deny the problem and many of those who have clearly brought the Labour Party into disrepute ... means, I am afraid, that I regard JVL as part of the problem and not part of the solution.8 He accepted that leading members of JVL were acting in good faith, sincerely believed that they expressed the views of many left-​wing Jews and thought that they were promoting the interests of Palestine. In reality, they were driving people away from the Labour Party: I am aware of many progressive socialist Jews who, after backing Jeremy Corbyn in two leadership elections and in the 2017 general election, are now considering leaving the party or have already done so, and JVL’s existence has been partly responsible.9 Jewdas was an organisation of Communist and anti-​Zionist Jews. Its core demographic was several decades younger than JVL. Compared to JVL, a much higher proportion of its members were religious and attended or even led synagogues. Unlike JVL, or indeed Jon Lansman, it did not make a fetish of membership of the

Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew  105

Labour Party; it did not set itself up as a participant within Labour’s factional wars. It would never have been so blunt as to say, as Lansman was doing, that JVL should consider its own existence. Jewdas was seemingly a much more flippant organisation than JVL: its Twitter account was fractious, and its literature often satirical. This veneer concealed the reality that Jewdas was much more serious than JVL about combating antisemitism. Three months before Ed Miliband resigned as leader of the Labour Party, and long before Corbyn had decided to run for the Labour leadership, it made a first attempt to set out its own definition of antisemitism, one which was intended to keep the issue as simple as possible: “Antisemitism is racism. It’s just a word for anti-​Jewish racism, hatred of Jews because they are Jews, equivalent to hating people because they are black, Asian, Irish or whatever”.10 How, then, could anyone avoid doing antisemitic or speaking anti-​Jewish words? The trick was to see people as individuals, and judge their words on that basis, rather than their membership of a group. When they do something, be it good or bad in your eyes, you don’t connect those actions with any group –​the actions are purely the responsibility of the individual in question.You don’t generalise about groups of people –​you allow individuals to define themselves in their own terms.11 In common with much of the non-​Jewish left, Jewdas had a keen idea of acts which were not antisemitic but were wrongly portrayed as racist. Unlike much of what would become the Corbynite left, Jewdas conceded that criticisms of Israel might cross the line into racism: Israel is a state.You can’t really be racist against a state.There is no position on Israel that is per se antisemitic –​although you can express views on it in a racist way.12 Cultural boycotts of Israel institutions were not automatically racist: Calling for Israel/​Palestine to become a single state, with equality for all its citizens? No racism there. Calling for BDS? Lots of states are subject to some kind of sanctions, this is not normally described as racist. 13 But blaming Israeli acts on its Jewish population crossed the line: [B]‌laming policies of the Israel government on “The Jews”? Yep, that’s racist. Blaming them on “the Zionists”? I’m afraid that, most of the time, that’s racist too –​“Zionist” has long been a synonym for “Jew” in much racist discourse.14 As the above leaflet indicates, Jewdas was also no admirer of those British Jews who focussed their efforts on stopping Corbyn. When the mural story broke in

106  Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew

2018, Jewdas published a further article. It reminded readers of the many times in which Jewdas had criticised antisemitism on the left: by calling for Livingstone’s expulsion, and denouncing Islamist terror attacks in France (at a time when the large majority of the British left chose to keep silence about them).They refused to justify the mural or make excuses for Corbyn’s support of it: There is no question that the mural was antisemitic ... Six years ago, that mural got taken down. At the time, Jeremy Corbyn consoled the artist who drew it. Inconsiderate? Definitely. Dodgy? Yeah. Racist? Maybe.15 That acknowledged, Corbyn’s reaction did not justify the anger now being directed at him: [I]‌ s it a communal crisis that the leader of the Labour Party posted an unthinking comment on a Facebook post six years ago? Only if you’re a hired troll whose job it is to dig up dirt on left-​wing politicians to force them out of office.16 At other times, in 2018 and 2019, Jewdas’ Twitter feed characterised Jewdas as “anti-​Zionist Jews who aren’t cranks”17 (seemingly a reference to JVL and to non-​ Jews who sheltered behind that group). It spoke wistfully of solving the problem with Labour by putting “pro/​anti-​Zionist Jews together in a room and let them hash it out over beigels”.18 In other words, while Jewdas might bait Jewish supporters of the Labour right, it saw them as part of a textured and diverse shared Jewish experience, people to be addressed, challenged, and persuaded. In choosing to sit down with Jewdas, Corbyn made time for people who had a coherent idea of what needed to be done, and one which was different from his or his allies’. The Daily Mail journalist Andrew Pierce attended the Seder. The story Pierce told his readers was that Jewdas was not a group of Jews at all, but really gentiles parodying and insulting Jewish traditions as part of their sinister mission of offending and humiliating Jews. Several subtle steps all came together to demonstrate that Jewdas were not the Jews they pretended to be. First, in contrast to real Jews, many members of Jewdas were self-​declared anti-​Zionists: One of Jewdas’ founders has explained that the group had “an explicitly non-​ Zionist stance”. Second, unlike British Jews, they did not eat meat: On Monday, it served vegan and gluten-​free food. Third, Jewdas had chosen to hold their Seder in a Christian church.

Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew  107

St Peter’s church in De Beauvoir, a well-​heeled enclave in Meg Hiller’s Hackney South and Shoreditch constituency. Fourth, they were extremely critical of self-​declared Jewish leaderships: Peaceful prayer and reflection seemed to be the last things on the mind of a succession of speakers who went to the front of the hall to denounce the State of Israel. Fifth, the members of Jewdas had replaced readings from the Haggadah (as would be appropriate at a first or second Seder) with a largely secular service: There was a succession of short political speeches, often peppered with four-​ letter words. Sixth, and finally, Jewdas replaced traditional Seder prayers with greetings of their own: They raised a beetroot in the air and shouted f*** capitalism.19 No doubt the Daily Mail assumed that its piece would be warmly received by the likes of the Jewish Chronicle. The latter’s editor, Stephen Pollard (a long-​time correspondent for right-​wing newspapers, including the Times, Mail, and Sunday Telegraph), did indeed supply a hastily written piece arguing that the Labour leader’s visit to a Jewdas gathering proved Corbyn’s lack of touch with mainstream Jewish opinion on issues such as antisemitism: “Mr Corbyn knew exactly what he was doing last night. And we should draw our own conclusion about his good faith in claiming to be an ally in the fight about antisemitism within his own party”.20 In an interview for Sky News, the president of the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkush denounced Jewdas for breaking what had until then been a shared communal wall excluding Corbyn. Arkush insisted that the Mail was right, that Jewdas were not Jews. The only thing which held Jewdas together, he insisted, was antisemitism, “They are lifelong campaigners against the Jewish community to whom they show the upmost disregard and contempt”. In consorting with Labour, Arkush maintained, the “group” was making itself “a source of virulent antisemitism”.21 However, as the story continued, more and more public voices confessed to having been, if anything, heartened that Corbyn should spend his time at a meeting with young Jews, even ones with views different from their parents’ generation. For prominent supporters of Jewdas include rabbis, yeshiva students, the editors of Jewish literary websites, and any number of other people who were visible in Jewish communal organisations. Arkush might denounce them with as much scorn as he could muster but they were not going to stop being Jews.

108  Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew

David Baddiel wrote, “They are just Jews who disagree with other Jews. Which means Jews ... To make out that it’s somehow antisemitic for him to spend Seder with them just because they’re far left is balls”.22 Writer and comic actor David Schneider presented the Mail’s position as: “ ‘Boo! Corbyn needs to get out and meet some Jews!’ (Corbyn spends Passover with some Jews at Jewdas) ‘Boo! Not those Jews!’ ”23 The Jewish Chronicle is overwhelmingly read by and bought by British Jews. But there is no general agreement within British Jewish opinion as to what it is that makes a person Jewish or distinguishes Jewish lives from other people’s except the accident that at some point in the past (and for many Jewish people, it is a very distant point in the past) Jews had ancestors who followed the Jewish religion and cared passionately about its ideas. British Jews are fractured between those who follow a strand of religious opinion and many others who are secular. Even religious Jews are split between Liberal, Reform, Masorti, Orthodox, and ultra-​Orthodox opinions. The number of religious Jews who worship in Orthodox synagogues has shrunk in the last century from 97 percent of synagogue members24 to 53 percent today.25 The Chief Rabbi, although he was used in the press as the embodiment of all Jewish opinion, speaks only for the Orthodox, and their numbers are shrinking, with young Jews splintering towards either secularism and atheism or towards much more intense ultra-​religious practices. No one in the broad Jewish readership at which the Jewish Chronicle is aimed could exclude Jewdas from Jewish opinion, least of all for the non-​crimes of eating vegetables instead of meat, or of making political speeches at a Third Seder instead of prayers. Later the same afternoon, the Jewish Chronicle ran a second piece by Charlotte Nicholls (a Labour Party member who had attended the Seder). Jewdas has also been absolutely steadfast in addressing antisemitism on the left, particularly in pro-​Palestine circles, including producing one of the most useful resources around on the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.26 Those politics were present in the Seder: all night, the only person whose name Nicholls heard booed at the Seder was Ken Livingstone.27 But Jewdas was being criticised as gathering of antisemites, when it was nothing more sinister than a meeting of left-​wing Jews. While some communal bodies lay claim to speaking on behalf of the whole community, as though we are some monolithic bloc that speak[s]‌with one collective voice, Jewdas is a place for disagreement, debate and where there are very few taboos.28 There is a very old Jewish tradition, going back to the first centuries of the Christian era, that one of the few circumstances under which a majority cannot

Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew  109

convict an accused of crimes is when the court is persuaded unanimously of their guilt. The Talmud provides that a unanimous verdict by the Sanhedrin (the Jewish court) must be thrown out and the defendant must be exonerated.29 While this seems illogical, even incomprehensible, it in fact reflects a very deep-​rooted idea in Jewish tradition, that all ideas –​including the most sacred –​should be challenged, and that the moment an idea is accepted by everyone is the time to reconsider it. It is easy to imagine a significant portion of the Jewish Chronicle’s audience reading the Mail article and Nicholls’ piece and thinking, you can say what you like about Corbyn and the Labour left, but Jewdas, I don’t have a problem with them.

Notes

1 Milken Archive, ‘Third Seder of the Arbeter Ring.’ 2 O. Jones, This Land:The Struggle for the Left (London: Penguin, 2020), p. 233. 3 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, p. 108. 4 ‘Jackie Walker –​Abused and Vilified,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 11 February 2019; ‘Ken Livingstone’s Resignation from the Labour Party,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 23 May 2018; ‘In Defence of Chris Williamson,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 2 July 2019. 5 Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 6 J. Leifer, ‘The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn,’ Jewish Currents, 27 November 2020. 7 Jones, This Land, p. 233. 8 J. Lansman to J. Manson, 4 May 2019; J. Wright, ‘Momentum Founder under Fire after Claiming Left-​Wing Jews Are “Not Part” of the Jewish Community,’ The Canary, 19 June 2019. 9 Wright, ‘Momentum Founder.’ 10 B. Trotsky, ‘Keeping Antisemitism Simple,’ Jewdas, 12 February 2015. 11 Trotsky, ‘Keeping Antisemitism.’ 12 Trotsky, ‘Keeping Antisemitism.’ 13 Trotsky, ‘Keeping Antisemitism.’ 14 Trotsky, ‘Keeping Antisemitism.’ 15 G. Cohen, ‘Enough Is Enough,’ Jewdas, 29 March 2018. 16 Cohen, ‘Enough Is Enough.’ 17 @jewdas, Twitter, 28 June 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 18 @jewdas, Twitter, 16 October 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 19 A. Pierce, ‘They Raised a Beetroot in the Air and Shouted F*** Capitalism,’ Daily Mail, 3 April 2018. 20 S. Pollard, ‘What Is Jeremy Corbyn Telling Us When He Breaks Unleavened Bread with Jewdas?’ Jewish Chronicle, 3 April 2018. 21 L. Harpin, ‘Jonathan Arkush Claims Jewdas Is “a Source of Virulent Antisemitism”,’ Jewish Chronicle, 3 April 2018. 22 @baddiel, Twitter, 3 April 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 23 J. Elgot, ‘ “I Learned a Lot”: Corbyn Defends Taking Part in Radical Jewish Event,’ Guardian, 3 April 2018. 24 E, R (on the Application of) v Governing Body of JFS & Anor [2009] UKSC 15, para 3. 25 C. C. Mashiah and J. Boyd, ‘Synagogue Membership in the United Kingdom in 2016,’ Institute for Jewish Policy Research, July 2017.

110  Jewdas and the figure of the bad Jew

26 C. Nicholls, ‘Why Jeremy Corbyn Should Be Applauded for Going to the Jewdas Seder,’ Jewish Chronicle, 3 April 2018. 27 Nicholls, ‘Why Jeremy Corbyn Should Be Applauded.’ 28 Nicholls, ‘Why Jeremy Corbyn Should Be Applauded.’ 29 E. Glatt, ‘The Unanimous Verdict According to the Talmud: Ancient Law Providing Insight into Modern Legal Theory,’ Pace International Law Review Online Companion 3/​20 (2010), pp. 316–​336.

9 THE LABOUR LEFT AND THE ISRAEL LOBBY

The crisis was doing increasingly strange things to everyone who was involved in it. The events were not simply being participated in by the relatively few key figures who were interviewed on television but rather by tens or hundreds of thousands of people were sharing their opinions with ever greater force on social media. People on both sides were opposing antisemitism while saying things intended to humiliate Jews they disagreed with. In July 2018, three newspapers, the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News, and Jewish Telegraph were published with a shared front page, “United We Stand”, warning that the election of a Corbyn-​led government would cause an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country”.1 What did the newspapers mean in saying that Labour threatened the existence of “Jewish life” from Britain? Pollard acknowledged that the piece could have been read as accusing Labour of planning genocide. But the intended meaning, he insisted, was less than that. They wouldn’t set up camps or anything like that. But the tenor of public life would be unbearable because the very people who are the enemy of the Jews, as it were, the antisemites, will be empowered by having their allies in government.2 There was no existential threat. Only the chance that unpleasant views would be encouraged, and this time not Jacob Rees-​Mogg,3 nor Nigel Farage,4 nor Roger Scruton sharing fantasies about George Soros,5 but a new and left-​wing counterpart to them.

The Israel lobby The Labour right was guilty of a strange kind of moral pride, as if for 15 years social democrats had been waiting for their chance to prove their moral superiority

112  The Labour left and the Israel lobby

to socialists and now at last life had supplied the opportunity to them. On the Labour left, people were unused to criticism and seemed incapable of processing the reality that their factional allies had said shameful things. On both sides, the crisis caused people’s politics to degrade, with fear and fantasy replacing sober analysis. Accusations that the left’s opponents had been bought or were in the pay of a foreign state (Israel) became common. One often-​cited piece of evidence in support of this belief was an Al Jazeera documentary series, “The Lobby”, which had been broadcast in 2017. The film showed employees of the Israeli embassy spying on pro-​Palestinians. Staffers boasted of recording conversations, having “hitlists” of people they wanted to “take down”, and of working with Labour Friends of Israel. The documentary was criticised as inaccurate, unfair, and antisemitic by its critics. Ella Rose, the director of the JLM, who was named in the documentary as a former employee of the Israeli embassy, reported Al Jazeera to Ofcom. The regulator found that Ms Rose was not treated unfairly in the programme.6 One of the problems in speaking of an Israeli lobby, and using it to explain Labour’s difficulties, was that people who did that often misunderstood how identification with a state works, any state, not only Israel.This point is made, for example, in Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein’s book Digital Militarism, which is one of the most careful attempts to understand how online advocacy for Israeli has operated during that country’s repeated military conflicts with Palestinian and with other armed forces since 2000. Beginning with the first attempts to hack the websites of Hamas and Hezbollah and proceeding as far as the “revenge selfies” of 2014, and their demands for active genocide against the Palestinians,7 Kuntsman and Stein show how very little Israeli advocacy has ever been structured through the institutions of that state. Rather, it has come about because ordinary people, in Israel or outside, take part in “everyday networking”.8 They voluntarily identify with that state and its actions, and spend vast amounts of their own time on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, throwing doubts on the facts of Palestinian casualties, and insisting on Israel’s essential victimhood and entitlement to occupy. A similar point is made from a different place on the ideological spectrum by Kenneth Stern, for many years the American Jewish Committee’s expert on antisemitism, and someone whose job included lobbying the Israeli government to obtain resources in order to frustrate pro-​Palestinian organising. The Israeli approach to BDS [in other words, to boycott, diversity from, or sanction Israeli institutions] has been erratic. When I first started writing about BDS and reached out to Israeli officials suggesting it be taken seriously they didn’t do so. In June 2015, he argues, that policy changed and for a time Israel did fund anti-​BDS measures. By July 2016, however, he insists the government had again lost interest, seeing the threat as peripheral.9 Such recollections are a long way from the conventional pro-​Palestinian account, in which the Israel government was a monster

The Labour left and the Israel lobby  113

of enormous size, funding all sorts of propaganda activities, sustaining the support without which pro-​Israel advocacy would no doubt crumble. The classic statement of the idea of an “Israeli lobby” is a piece published in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in 2006. It argued that groups such as the American-​Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) were a uniquely successful special-​interest group. They did not merely skew US foreign policy, but they persuaded American politicians that US interests and those of Israel were identical. Mearsheimer and Walt insisted that there was nothing sinister behind the lobby and that it was simply a special interest group, like the National Rifle Association or the AFL-​CIO trade union federation. At the lobby’s core, they argued, was a combination of the voting and financial power of American Jews. They cited Thomas Dine, head of AIPAC at the time, explaining how in 1984 AIPAC had worked to depose Senator Charles Percy, “All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians –​those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire –​got the message”.10 When dealing with any lobbyist’s memoir, it is worth reading them cautiously; after all, part of their work is to raise funds and there is no better way to do that than by exaggerating their impact. Moreover, even if we assume that Dine’s account was correct, how was AIPAC able to generate such unanimity of Jewish opinion? Reading Mearsheimer and Walt, you would assume that Percy was a moderate Republican punished for having supported Palestinian rights. Actually, the issue was that he had opposed calls to deport to Estonia Karl Linnas,11 a former concentration camp commander who had participated in the wartime murder of Jews. It is no wonder then that many Jewish Americans supported AIPAC’s efforts to secure his electoral defeat. The problem with the explanation of US-​Israeli alliance which rely not on strategic calculation or on ideology but the power of Jewish voters is that the Jewish population of the country was just over seven million people in 2020,12 or around two percent of the country’s total population. Moreover, it was concentrated in New York, which had voted for the Democrat in nine presidential elections in a row by the time of writing.Which Republican candidate would waste time chasing votes there? Two dynamics which were present in Mearsheimer and Walt’s account but subordinate within it were the role of Christian Zionists and the part played by military contractors. Not for the first or last time did it take a Palestinian writer to correct their account, purging it of any possible conspiratorial logic. Columbia University’s Middle East historian Joseph Massad pointed out that Mearsheimer and Walt implicitly blamed Jews in America for the struggles of the Palestinians, when what needed addressing was US military power, which had been used consistently against national liberation struggles all over the world.13 The moment we start to see the Israel lobby for what it is, not a secret conspiracy by American or British Jews (whose views on Israel are diverse) but a series of open interest groups sustained largely by companies which profit from arms sales,14 we can also subordinate the fantasy that behind every Jewish person who

114  The Labour left and the Israel lobby

has an over-​rosy idea of the state of democracy in Israel’s ethnic state, there is the hidden hand of Mossad or anyone else manipulating them. What many of my fellow leftists seemed to lose during Labour’s crisis was the sense that people could disagree with you, and just disagree with you –​because politics is like that, and all the time different people have different ideas of what is practical or desirable or just –​without needing to imagine bad faith or the assistance of any foreign power. Many diaspora Jews have a very hazy sense of what life is like in Palestine, or how the occupation has transformed Israel. They speak to family members and are shown the best of that country. Palestinian resistance is painted to them in the most threatening of lights. If you wish to change how other people think, you will not succeed by shouting at people you disagree with or by assuming bad faith, rather you need clarity and empathy.15 Above all, you should avoid talking about Jews in ways which portray them as in the pay of a foreign power, secretly controlling the Labour Party, and so on.

Online as well as offline By spring 2018, there were growing numbers of people who were suspended or expelled from political roles or removed from employment, rarely for overt acts of antisemitism, but more often for much more nebulous wrongs –​for annoying words rather than actual racism.16 One example of how someone could be subject to investigation was the case of Stan Keable, a Public Protection and Safety Officer at the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. On 26 March 2018, as Corbyn’s support for the Mear One mural became front page news, a rally was held outside Parliament to criticise Corbyn and the leadership of the Labour Party, under the slogan “Enough is Enough”. Keable was outside Parliament, not with that group, but with a smaller counter-​protest called by JVL. As the participants from the two events milled together, Keable and one of the Enough is Enough demonstrators found themselves talking, while a BBC journalist David Grossman filmed their conversation on his mobile phone. The anti-​Corbyn demonstrator pointed out the antisemitic character of the Mear One mural. Keable replied that Corbyn had a life-​long history of anti-​racism. The conversation dragged towards the talking points Ken Livingstone had introduced. Keable was inching towards the point that structured into Zionism, which is a belief that Jewish people can never live at peace in Europe.“The Zionist movement from the beginning was saying that they accepted that Jews are not acceptable here”.17 Keable told the anti-​Corbyn demonstrator: “the Nazis were antisemitic … the Zionist movement at the time collaborated with them”.18 Without asking Keable’s permission, the BBC journalist David Grossman placed the film on his Twitter feed and it received numerous comments. The Conservative MP for Hammersmith and Fulham Greg Hands shared Grossman’s post.19 Soon after, Keable was fired. When asked about the conversation, Keable apologised for any offence he had caused. He was a very long-​standing employee, and the employer gave no real

The Labour left and the Israel lobby  115

consideration to a sanction short of dismissal. Although the words were inappropriate (as Keable accepted they were –​he apologised for them), the employer did not suggest that they were antisemitic. It was clear from the film that the conversation between Keable and the other demonstrator had been quiet and respectful. Moreover, he was on the event in his private time, and with no work uniform to identify him. Accordingly, an Employment Tribunal found the dismissal unfair. It did reduce his compensation to reflect the extent to which Keable’s union representative had been fault, finding that he had been rude, derogatory, and insulating to Hammersmith’s managers but only by ten percent. The contribution of Keable, or his adviser, to his sacking was minimal.20 On each side of the antisemitism crisis, there were people trying to cause suffering. Social media commentary included claims that Keable was “twisted” and “perverted”.21 When Hands shared the exchange with his followers –​a fact used later to justify Keable’s dismissal –​63 people liked his tweet.22 You have to wonder how many of them had noticed Keable’s grey hair and beard or wondered, if he was dismissed, when he might work again?

Fighting against socialism Something particularly destabilising was happening to the Corbyn project. For one of the most appealing aspects of Corbynism, at the outset, had been the new leader’s insistence that if he or others on the left were accused of doing something wrong, for example, by holding the belief that the Palestinians were entitled to a state in which they could live freely, Corbyn supporters should respond with kindness23 to those who disagreed with them: What this campaign is not about, and never will be about, is personal abuse, name calling, calling into question the character of other people, or other candidates ... Let’s have a serious debate, serious discussion, serious proposals put forward.24 Numerous sound bites took up this message: “I don’t do personal”,25 or, as Corbyn said in one election rally, “they go low, we go high.They go lower, we go higher”.26 Yet with Corbyn himself accused of supporting antisemitism over the Mear One mural and several of his supporters behaving in a way which was blithe to how middle-​of-​the-​road Jewish opinion might see them, the self-​perception of Corbynites that they were a moral vanguard, replacing capitalism with something better, felt increasingly at odds with reality. The damage this process did to Corbyn supporters can be seen vividly when you look at the far edges of the Corbyn movement. People who identified not just with Labour but the far left were looking to theorise their disappointment with three untrustworthy groups of people: Corbyn himself, his critics, and the large group of Corbyn supporters who were shocked to see people defending antisemitic stereotypes and, behind each of those three, “the Jews”.

116  The Labour left and the Israel lobby

Small groups of individuals attempted to merge antisemitic categories with non-​racist opinions, creating a new and deeply troubling synthesis of both. This happened to one Trotskyist grouplet, Socialist Fight, whose members explained the wave of anti-​Corbyn sentiment by theorising that Jews were a class of people whose interest were ethnically opposed to those of the left and of workers and of the oppressed people of the world. They claimed that there existed a “Jewish-​Zionist bourgeoisie caste”, a “class enemy” of the workers who dominated global politics, principally through their implantation in the United States, and whose presence in Britain enabled them to “police and discipline the workers movement”, in other words, to control the Labour Party and to make sure that believers in the Corbyn project were denied a fair hearing.27 “Zionism”, supporters of Socialist Fight wrote, “is not simply a Middle Eastern matter, but plays a major role in the politics of advanced capitalist countries with much larger populations and formal social and economic weight than Israel”. The support for Israel, they concluded,“is the cutting edge of bourgeois reaction today”.28 We should show such activists the minimum respect of assuming they meant what they wrote. If this metaphor of the “cutting edge” is to be believed, then the workers of the world are suffering from an economic system which repeatedly favours the rich and is manifested in redundancies, homelessness, and so on. The dynamic factor in this arrangement, the most important and most dangerous development, is that a significant number of Jewish people identify with rather than against Israel. Because they do so, we can understand why workers in London lose their homes, why Trump and his supporters are able to introduce their Muslim travel ban, and so on. Should the proportion of British Jews who identify with the state of Israel shrink, until there was no longer a Zionist majority, then by some unexplained logic all humanity would be redeemed. This fantasy makes Jewish people the masters of the world, the controllers of the destinies of the oppressed everywhere. It is an antisemitic stereotype, making sense of the world through myths of Jewish conspiracy and control. It also expresses, in a direct and coherent form, a much wider strand of opinion on the left –​that there really was an Israel lobby, and that hundreds (perhaps thousands) of ordinary British Jews were complicit with it. In the conventional narrative of the Labour crisis, the source of antisemitism is organised left-​wing groups outside Labour who have long expressed anti-​Jewish racism save only “in little-​read pamphlets and poorly-​attended meetings”.29 Thus when journalists or Labour full-​timers investigated them, they were playing a heroic role in terms of choking off the main route by which racism came into the party. On the surface, Socialist Fight seems to fit within this story: the group emerged outside the Labour Party and then came into it. But the real history is more complex. For, prior to 2015, its members had been active on the left for decades, in all manner of other campaigns, and had shown little if any sign of developing any such theorised antisemitism. Indeed, prior to Corbyn’s accession to the leadership the outside Labour left had seen a complex ecology of contending voices, in which Jewish socialists were prominent and instances of antisemitism challenged (future

The Labour left and the Israel lobby  117

chapters give examples of this practice, including the isolation of Gilad Atzmon and the removal of Holocaust deniers from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign). After 2015, however, such gatekeeping collapsed, in both the small group and Labour left. Socialist Fight did not simply import an already-​existing antisemitism into the Labour Party; rather, they turned themselves into antisemites during the Labour crisis. They had fixed their ambitions on to the larger milieu of Corbynism. When that movement was frustrated, they needed to confect an explanation for the fierceness of anti-​Corbyn feeling in the Labour Party and beyond. It was only then that Socialist Fight started to blame the Jews. The point in referring to Socialist Fight is not to exaggerate their importance: this was a small and fissiparous group of perhaps a dozen people, whose members were expelled from the Labour Party and then, as soon as their views became clear, even from such groups as Labour against the Witch-​Hunt. Its best-​known figure Gerry Downing was quoted on BBC News,30 in the Times,31 and Independent,32 not because he represented a significant current of opinion but because he was not, and in order to expose the strangeness and unpleasantness of the left.33 The problem was that Socialist Fight was not alone in coming up with spurious explanations for the crisis; other supporters of the left were taking baby steps in the same direction. People who had been in the Labour Party for many years and had shown no signs at all of antisemitic instinct could now be seen complaining about press hostility, blaming it on the influence of foreign governments, finding everywhere conspiracies by Israeli agents real or actual, talking of Jewish MPs as traitors, and blaming the failure of their own politics on the ethnicity of people who disagreed with them. A diluted version of the Socialist Fight argument –​that Jews were hostile to the Labour Party because Jews were middle class –​became increasingly common. Tens of thousands of members of the Labour Party were telling themselves that British Jews had the power to sustain a scandal and destroy the prospect of socialism.34 If Socialist Fight provided a rare example of a left-​wing group with a consistently antisemitic understanding of the world, there were many other people expressing a diffuse but real antisemitism. Writing in Salvage magazine, Barnaby Raine captured this recurring hostility to Jews, which many of us saw repeatedly in 2018 and 2019: Readers who have had the misfortune to spend any time in Facebook groups like the Labour Party Forum will know … [t]‌here a veritable stream of comments complains about Rothschild conspiracies and international “Zionist” cabals.35 He characterised it as “a structure of feeling, as potentially unconscious, as ideological” and warned that even people who saw themselves as anti-​racist were liable to it: They might say “Zionists” and mean “Jews”, knowingly or not. Probably only a few of those who harbour such bigotries splatter them across Twitter, or write articles openly calling for more antisemitism.36

118  The Labour left and the Israel lobby

Raine was far from alone in looking at left-​wing social media and finding an increasing number of left-​wingers seemingly succumbing to fantasies about Jewish power. The Labour Party expelled one member in relation to antisemitism in 2017, ten in 2018, and 45 in 2019. (Another 104 members quit the party in 2019, seemingly to pre-​empt expulsion.)37 Between April and October 2020, 235 members were investigated for antisemitism, 83 of whom were expelled.38 In December 2019, the text of the “closing submissions” made by the JLM to the EHRC were leaked online. Key parts of those submissions were taken up by the EHRC and shaped its final report. A later chapter will criticise the EHRC for failing to give any flavour of the antisemitic campaign at its worst. Here it is worth citing those submissions to give a flavour of what was missing from the EHRC document. A member of the Labour Party complained of 22 incidents of antisemitic harassment at meetings of his CLP, including being described as “a child killer”, “good with money”, and being told that “Hitler was right”.39 A Jewish councillor was told to go home and count their money, after being deselected.40 Online abuse included posts denying the Holocaust, using images of pigs to insult Jews, calling members of the Labour Party “bent-​nosed manipulative liars”, referring to Jews as “kikes” or “yids”, or speaking of “cockroaches of the Jew kind”.41 Jewish MPs, or candidates for Parliament, complained of having received widespread antisemitic abuse. One Jewish Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPC) described receiving antisemitic messages on social media, including “You and your Zionist cult are NOT welcome. This is London. Not Tel Aviv”. After the suspension of Marc Wadsworth, Ruth Smeeth received some 25,000 hostile messages, including ones describing her as a “CIA/​MI5/​Mossad informant” and a “fucking traitor”.42 Other PPCs for Labour shared posts speaking of “Zionist Masters”, or spoke of Jewish MPs as having “Zionist sympathies”, or accused the Conservatives of being backed by the Israeli military.43 One candidate for election as a local councillor reposted material online which referred to the Holocaust as a “hoax”44 and spoke of former Labour MP David Miliband as “a Jew he is paid by Rothchild who own Israel and also controls [M]‌ossad who kill people for Israel and Zionism ... people like JFK”.45 The more such comments drifted from the margins into the centre of Labour discourse, the more it seemed that the criticisms levied against Labour had become true.

Notes 1 ‘Three Jewish Papers Take the Unprecedented Step of Publishing the Same Page on Labour Antisemitism,’ Jewish Chronicle, 25 July 2018. 2 J. Leifer, ‘The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn,’ Jewish Currents, 27 November 2020. 3 Chapter 1. 4 Chapters 6 and 9. 5 Chapter 14.

The Labour left and the Israel lobby  119

6 Complaint by Ms Ella Rose the Lobby, Al Jazeera English, 12 January 2017, Ofcom Broadcast and on Demand Bulletin, 9 October 2017. 7 A. Kuntsman and R. L. Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 24–​25, 91–​95. 8 Kuntsman and Stein, Digital Militarism, pp. 16–​17. 9 K. S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict:The Israel/​Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: New Jewish Press, 2020), p. 110. 10 J. Mearsheimer and S. Walt, ‘The Israel Lobby,’ London Review of Books, 23 March 2006. 11 J. Anderson, ‘D’Amato Disowns Letter,’ Evening News, 14 January 1985. 12 ‘Jewish Population in the United States: State by State,’ Jewish Virtual Library. Accessed 3 November 2020. 13 J. Massad, ‘Blaming the Israel Lobby,’ Counterpunch, 25 March 2006. 14 In 2016, the US and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding under which the US pledged to provide $38 billion in military aid over a ten-​year period. Most of this was intended to take the form of purchases of US-​built military technology, including F-​45 joint strike fighters, arguably the most technologically advanced fighter jets in the world and unarguably one of the most expensive. Its predecessor the F-​35 was the lifetime recipient of more than $1 trillion in grants from the US taxpayer. Congressional Research Service, ‘U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel.’ 7 August 2019;V. Insinna, ‘Inside America’s Dysfunctional Trillion-​Dollar Fighter-​Jet Program,’ New York Times, 21 August 2019. Lockheed Martin’s PAC was ranked by Open Secrets’ 16th most active lobbying company of 5,560 listed on its database in 2019. Open Secrets, ‘Lockheed Martin.’ Accessed 3 November 2020. 15 N. Whittome, ‘Labour Antisemitism Must Be Confronted –​With Nuance, Clarity and Empathy,’ LabourList, 29 November 2020. 16 G. Philo, M. Berry, J. Schlosberg,A. Lerman, and D. Miller, Bad News for Labour:Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief (London: Pluto, 2019), p. 68, 17 Keable v London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Case No: 2205904/​2018, para 31. 18 Keable v Hammersmith and Fulham, para 31. 19 @GregHands, Twitter, 27 March 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 20 Keable v Hammersmith and Fulham, para 177. 21 Keable v Hammersmith and Fulham, para 22. 22 @GregHands, Twitter, 27 March 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 23 D. Renton, ‘The Civility of Corbyn,’ Lives Running, 3 September 2020. 24 E. Hartley, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Responds to Tony Blair: “I Don’t Do Personal Abuse”,’ Huffpost, 14 August 2015. 25 S. Hattenstone, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: “I Don’t Do Personal”,’ Guardian, 17 June 2015. 26 Jeremy Corbyn at Harrow East Labour election rally. @nicholaswatt, Twitter, 30 October 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 27 I. Donovan, ‘The Wages of Opportunism –​Zionism, Centrism and Capitulation’ Socialist Fight, 7 April 2020. 28 ‘Why Marxists Must Address the Jewish Question Concretely Today,’ Socialist Fight, 22 August 2015. 29 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, pp. 98. 30 ‘Revolutionary Socialist Gerry Downing to Appeal against Labour Expulsion,’ BBC News, 10 March 2016. 31 D. Brown and P. Maguire, ‘9/​11 Shame of Counter-​Protester Gerry Downing,’ Times, 28 March 2018. 32 B. Kentish, ‘Group Set Up to Protest against Labour’s Expulsion of Members Accused of Antisemitism Expels Members for Alleged Antisemitism,’ Independent, 2 January 2018.

120  The Labour left and the Israel lobby

33 In spring 2020 Downing repudiated his former colleagues and criticised them for antisemitism. T. Greenstein, ‘Socialist Fight’s Split,’ Weekly Worker, 20 March 2020. 34 M. Richmond, ‘Anti-​Racism as Procedure,’ Protocols, 15 December 2020. 35 B. Raine, ‘Jewophobia,’ Salvage, 7 January 2019. 36 Raine, ‘Jewophobia.’ 37 ‘Labour Party Disciplinary Processes on Antisemitism –​Statistics,’ Labour Party, January 2020. 38 J. Pickard, ‘Keir Starmer Pleads against Labour “Civil War” over Corbyn Suspension,’ Financial Times, 30 October 2020. 39 ‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party,’ Jewish Labour Movement, December 2019, p. 4. 40 ‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party,’ Jewish Labour Movement, p. 5. 41 ‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party,’ Jewish Labour Movement, p. 6. 42 ‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party,’ Jewish Labour Movement, p. 8. 43 ‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party,’ Jewish Labour Movement, p. 19. 44 ‘Labour Suspends Candidate Who Called Holocaust a “Hoax”,’ Jewish News, 22 March 2018. 45 ‘Antisemitism in the Labour Party,’ Jewish Labour Movement, p. 18.

10 THE LABOUR RIGHT AND ANTI-​ZIONIST JEWS

The Enough is Enough demonstration against Corbyn was supported by several hundred people, including both Jews and non-​Jews. Among the latter were any number of people whose previous interest in anti-​racist causes was limited and partial.They included Lord Tebbit, famous for inventing the “Tebbit test” under which migrants and their descendants should be accepted as British only if they agreed to support British interests, for example, by supporting England at cricket. Another who participated was Ian Paisley Jr, whose Democratic Unionist Party seeks to maintain discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland.1 In the same way that attitudes towards antisemitism were rapidly becoming a testing-​point for socialists (and had never ceased to be one for Jews), something similar was taking place on the right. Large numbers of people, only some of whom were Jews, were using the issue to demonstrate their moral superiority to the left. You could discern this, in micro form, by looking at the Twitter profiles of the people supporting Greg Hands’ call for Stan Keable to be investigated.Two of them had lilac Stars of David in their Twitter profile, another described himself as a Jew. The other 60 had nothing in their profile to suggest that they were Jewish. The truly distinguishing feature was how many had profiles showing that they identified with the political right, “Tory”, “Conservative councillor”, “Brexit before Party”,2 and many other variations of the same. If we assume that most of these people were not Jewish (since Jews are only a small proportion of British society, or of people posting on Twitter), then why had these others invested enough time and energy into fighting antisemitism, so that they found themselves self-​r ighteously calling for a worker to be investigated and presumably dismissed? There is a long-​standing Jewish habit of distrust in the face of expressions of approval by people who are not Jews and, for all their seeming admiration of Jewish people or even Israel, often turn out to have quite a poor understanding of what

122  The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews

motivates Jews. As the saying goes, “The philosemite is the antisemite who loves Jews”.3 For many left-​wing Jews, what was troubling about the support of Norman Tebbit or Ian Paisley was the thought: what kind of Jewishness were they trying to encourage –​and at whose expense? This was a pressing issue for the Labour Party. For, during 2018, Labour was under pressure to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which it did in full in September 2018.4 One group whose membership was potentially endangered by rules treating all anti-​Zionist comment as potentially suspect was Jewish members of the Labour Party. For ever since 1948, the creation of the State of Israel, the expulsion from Palestine of 800,000 Arab refugees,5 and the passing of the Law of Return in 1950 which gives Jews abroad the right to come and live in Israel and to gain Israeli citizenship, there has always been a strand of Jewish opinion which has regarded these acts, and the subsequent intensification of the occupation, as shameful. In broad terms, the Israeli left promises to continue but mitigate the injustice of occupation while the Israeli right seeks to extend it. So, in July 2018, Israel’s right-​wing (Likud, United Torah Judaism, Shas, etc.) government introduced a new Nationality Bill, making the establishment of Jewish settlements on previously Palestinian-​owned land “a national priority”, degrading Arabic from an official language to one without that status. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the Knesset from the podium after the Bill was passed, saying: This is our country. The state of the Jews ... [T]‌oday we etched into the rock of law: this is our country, this is our language, this is our national anthem, and this is our flag. Long live the state of Israel!6 That language was the acknowledgement of a right-​wing project for the racial promotion of one group of people (“our country ... the Jews”) over another (the Arab population of Israel and Palestine). Netanyahu was criticised from the left.7 The point where Israeli left-​wing opinions meets British left-​wing opinion, in the hearts of Jewish members of the Labour Party, is precisely where you would expect robust criticism of Israel to be heard. Part of the problem faced by the Labour Party, from 2018 onwards, is that it was being repeatedly asked to investigate allegations that a member had spoken in lurid terms about Israel or Jews. A significant number of these complaints of antisemitism was being made by non-​Jews, and a significant minority of the targets was Jewish. Here are some of the anti-​Zionist Jews who have been suspended from membership of the Labour Party. In 2018, Diana Neslen posted on Facebook that the Holocaust had not merely led to the creation of Israel, it had also seen the destruction of a different Jewish culture, which had rejected the nationalism of that country. “All lives are worthy and since the Israelis learnt the wrong lesson their baubles no longer have any currency”. She was investigated and received a letter from the party, telling her, “These comments have caused offence”.8 Stephen Solley, a former

The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews  123

chair of the Bar Human Rights Committee, responded to a leadership campaign by Miriam Mirwitch of JLM asking for people to vote for her as a Jew and someone who “face[s]‌antisemitism every day”. Solley believed that her words were hyperbolic. He wrote back, “The Jewish Labour Movement is, in my opinion, a force for ill and something of a con in that it is destructive of socialism. It is a pro-​Israel, anti-​ Palestine group. It becomes imperative to vote against you”. Complaints were made to his chambers, the Bar Standards Board, and the Labour Party. Cleared by the first two, he remained suspended from the Party ten months later.9 Naomi Wimborne-​ Idrissi, a member of JVL, was accused of telling in a meeting of her Chingford CLP that “The cynical manipulation of Jewish fears and concerns is unforgivable and undermines all our work against racism of all kinds”.10 This was of course not the first time in history that a coalition of Jews and non-​ Jews were coming together to insist that another group of people (Jews) had gone so far beyond permissible behaviour that they could no longer be considered Jews. An old story tells how as long ago as 1907, the British Conservative politician Arthur Balfour (and future author of the Balfour Declaration, which accepted the formation of a Jewish state in Israel) met Chaim Weizmann, then a lecturer at Manchester University and later the first president of Israel. Balfour could not understand why Weizmann and others insisted on their claims to Jerusalem. “Are there many Jews who think like you?” asked Balfour. “I believe I speak the minds of millions of Jews”, replied Weizmann. “It is curious”, Balfour remarked, “the Jews I meet are quite different”. “Mr Balfour”, said Weizmann, “you meet the wrong kind of Jews”.11 The acknowledgement that Zionism splits Jewish opinion has not always been made with a twinkle in the eye. The Oxford philosopher Brian Klug describes watching in 2009 as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council held a joint event in London’s Trafalgar Square, in support of the actions of the state of Israel which was then attacking Gaza. He and other anti-​Zionist Jews had gathered to express their dissent: To get to our site outside Canada House we had to run a gauntlet of jeers. “Traitors”, “cowards”, “scum” and other epithets were hurled in our direction. When the rally was over, some of us were spat at and called “kapos” ... The contempt and hatred for us, as Jews, was palpable.12 For Klug, the experience of being denounced by other Jews was bracing but tolerable. It was, he argued, a recurring and an authentically Jewish experience. One source which helps to explain why anti-​Zionist Jews might identify with Palestinians is the memoir of the American leftist Abbie Hoffman, written by his younger brother Jack.The two brothers were born in 1936 and 1939, making them on average just ten years older than the founders JVL. Jack describes attending a yeshiva in the 1950s, and the emphasis that was put on learning the lessons of the Second World War, and how it was intended to teach a philosophy of speaking out against injustice even if the whole world was against you:

124  The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews

The recently concluded Second World War was discussed, and the Holocaust, although we didn’t call it that. The term used was “the camps”. History, and by that, I mean the horror of history, was something we never talked about anywhere else, not at school at home.13 An ordinary Jewish education in postwar Britain or American imposed on its recipients a sense that it was up to them to redeem all suffering humanity: It was designed to impress on us that somewhere we were connected to what had happened. And we were meant to understand that, because of what had happened, we, as Jews, were different from other people. We carried in us a more weighty burden of responsibility.14 There was, in other words, a generational aspect to certain kinds of Jewish support for Corbyn: a sense that history could be redeemed only if Jews sided unequivocally with the oppressed. This view was formed by what one commentator Adam Sutcliffe terms an “idealistic” moment in Jewish history, before the “adversarialism” took root which is the price of support for Israel.15 From the perspective of such socialists, indifference to other forms of mainstream Jewish opinion was not to be deprecated, rather it was a confirmation that they were in the right. By the time Labour’s crisis was underway, and compared to 2010, the insults had become harsher and the opportunities to shrug them off were less. So, in November 2019, the Jewish children’s author Michael Rosen found himself explaining to his followers on social media that, yes, he was Jewish, and no, he did not support the campaign against Corbyn: I was brought up knowing that I was Jewish, and have participated in all my life (read, studied, reflected on, been particularly interested in) secular Jewish activities to do with Jewish writers, artists, and Jewish history and have of course reflected on this in my writing in hundreds of different ways.16 The response of self-​r ighteous anti-​antisemites was to remove Rosen from the category “Jew” and therefore to feel free in subjecting him to abuse, as he explained: To say these things has invited Jews and non-​Jews on Twitter to call me a “kapo”17 a “used Jew” (that from the editor of “Jewish News”),18 someone who “dons the cloak of Jewishness” ... one of the “useful Jewish idiots” (from the commentator Dan Hodges),19 “a cheerleader for Soros” (from Lee Harpin political editor of the Jewish Chronicle).20 Other campaigners against anti-​Jewish racism had, Rosen complained, begged the BBC to not employ him on its programme “Word of Mouth”.21 He concluded: “Clearly some people think that the best way to combat antisemitism is to be antisemitic”.22

The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews  125

It is worth thinking how much of this abuse might have crossed the line into racial discrimination or harassment contrary to the Equality Act. To call someone a “kapo”, for the reason given in previous chapters, borders on and will very often cross the line into racial harassment, and the phrases “used Jew” or “don[ning] the cloak of Jewishness” –​insults which rely on excluding a Jewish person from the category of “Jew” –​are little better. As for the idea that Rosen (a man whose association with the far left long preceded Corbyn’s ascent to the Labour leadership) had somehow become “a cheerleader” for George Soros, this would fit into the different category of invoking a familiar, and long-​standing, antisemitic myth: that left-​wing Jews could only possibly be acting under the command of some sinister capitalist patron. It was just old-​ fashioned antisemitism. The fact that this abuse came from the Labour right meant that the press took no interest in it; but it did not make the insults any less hurtful.

Speeding up the pace of investigations On 3 April 2018, that is, on the same day that the Daily Mail broke the “Jewdas” story, and after a lengthy internal battle Corbyn replaced the previous general secretary of his party Iain McNichol with a Corbyn supporter, Jennie Formby. From that point onwards, complaints were investigated much more quickly but, equally, the explanation that Corbyn’s opponents were sabotaging investigations could no longer apply. Interviewed in May 2019, John McDonnell looked back on the previous three years of conflicts within the Labour Party and explained them as a series of failures by the leadership which had taken on trust promises that the Chakrabarti report would be fully introduced: [W]‌ e kept asking the bureaucracy about progress in implementing the Chakrabarti recommendations. I asked in particular about the legal advisory panel. When Formby arrived, she realised how much work hadn’t been done and was therefore still left to do.23 Corbyn’s critics insist that this account is untrue. While McDonnell and others say that investigations were frustrated, Corbyn’s critics on the Labour right accuse him and his allies of having selectively chosen to frustrate certain investigations for political reasons, because they wanted to protect left-​wing members of the Labour Party (Corbynites). This charge was levelled with the greatest effect in a BBC Panorama documentary broadcast on 10 July 2019. It featured interviews with eight former employees of the Labour Party’s Disputes Team, who described in graphical detail the antisemitic incidents they had experienced and their dissatisfaction with the handling of complaints. They blamed the Leader’s Office for the inertia of the party’s complaints machinery. One of these former staffers said in the programme that he had been so miserable that he thought of killing himself.24

126  The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews

Interspersed with the interviews, and acting as the programme’s skeleton, were repeated extracts from interviews with two commentators who have written about antisemitism, blaming it on the left’s criticisms of Israel: Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust and Alan Johnson, senior research fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. Rich and Johnson argued that the cause of the Labour Party’s difficulties was the Labour left and Corbyn’s support for Palestine. The programme endorsed that view, using the experiences of the former employees to fill out Rich and Johnson’s political analysis. Part of the Panorama documentary was a leaked email from Seumas Milne, the Labour Party’s executive director of Strategy and Communications. According to Panorama, Milne had complained that the disputes process was being used to settle scores. “Milne asked for a review of the disciplinary process into antisemitic complaints”. Milne was quoted, as follows: ... we need to review ... ... muddling up political disputes with racism ...25 This, the press accepted, was conclusive proof of the bad faith of the Corbyn leadership. Here was racism, the most egregious of political sins, and the Labour Party machine was treating complaints of antisemitism not as the racism they were but as mere “political disputes”. The press treated the Milne email as one of the key allegations made by the documentary. The Scotsman reported the Panorama documentary under the headline: “Jeremy Corbyn aides ‘interfered’ in antisemitism investigations”.26 The report in the Independent was titled, “Jeremy Corbyn’s team repeatedly intervened in antisemitism cases, claim Labour whistle-​blowers in new documentary”, while the coverage in City A.M. was titled, “Jeremy Corbyn’s office DID assess antisemitism complaints, whistle-​blowers tell BBC Panorama”.27 Seumas Milne was, in a sense, an easy target. A former Guardian journalist, it had been a theme of his writing for many years that the Soviet Union and Western Communism in particular had been the subject of calumnies. “The number of victims of Stalin’s terror has been progressively inflated over recent years”, he wrote in 2002,28 and in 2006 he maintained that the Soviet Union should be recognised for having “boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination”.29 Milne had responsibility for Corbyn’s press office. It was relatively easy for critics to present him as Corbyn’s “pet Stalinist”,30 who had therefore taught the Labour left to share his own indifference to the Soviet record,31 including (the Telegraph argued) Stalin’s record of antisemitism.32 Moreover, if we place the email in the context of the specific investigation that was being discussed, it is right that its subject, Glyn Secker, had questions to answer. He was one of Labour’s most prominent Jewish members. He was also the secretary of JVL. However, on social media he had posted messages which were likely to antagonise and at times were conspiratorial.

The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews  127

For example, in summer 2016, Secker had tweeted his support for theories claiming that Israel was purchasing ISIS oil, enabling that terrorist state “to finance their weapons of war”.33 This was paranoid nonsense; it is a long-​standing conspiracy theory, actively promoted by the Iranian government and its associated media outlet Press TV.34 In its most coherent form, the myth claims that we can know the existence of links between Israel and ISIS because they had been revealed to the public by the American whistle-​blower Edward Snowden.35 But this smoking-​gun is a matter of internet fantasy. Snowden revealed no such plot.36 The myth survives because it appeals to credulous people who need some invisible piece of string which joins together all the powers in the world they dislike –​even when those powers are at war with each other. Indeed, Secker had not reposted such myths only once but repeatedly.37 Whether or not these were grounds for expulsion, the fact that such a prominent member of the Labour Party left could publicise such nonsense was profoundly dispiriting. Again, following a speech by an Israeli minister who said European leaders who advocate Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions were antisemitic, Secker had tweeted “THE CIRCULARITY. Jew=Zionism=Israel=Jew” followed by a quote from Lord of the Rings: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, And in the darkness bind them”.38 This was grating and annoying behaviour: Israel is not Tolkien’s villain Sauron. The idea that Jews are distinct from the state of Israel is a healthy one –​much of the argument of this book relies on that very distinction. But in Tolkien’s book, the “One Ring” summarises the brutality and dumb obedience of an evil power bent on enslaving the entire world. In that context, and absent the partisan rancour of Labour’s crisis, it was entirely explicable both that Secker might be called to some sort of meeting and that he might have been invited to reconsider his behaviour online and invited to change it. Following the same approach as that outlined in the case of Jackie Walker, an investigation fixed on behaviour rather than on outcomes might have asked Secker whether he was capable of grasping that his behaviour was likely to antagonise other members of the Labour Party.Was he capable of withdrawing those messages and apologise for them? Would he look again and admit that, for example, sharing fantasies about Israel and ISIS replicated a conspiratorial way of understanding the world? All that acknowledged, it is clear that if viewers of the Panorama programme had been shown Milne’s email, and the crucial sentence in full, then it would have been clear that he was the victim of selective quotation. Milne had written: None of the posts can be identified as antisemitic in the terms of the definition we have adopted as a party or the guidance in the Chakrabarti report. Several of them quite clearly relate to political arguments within the Jewish community, between Jewish Labour activists and between Jewish Zionists and Jewish anti-​Zionists.39

128  The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews

He reminded the readers of his email that Secker was Jewish, and –​in that context –​ warned of the dangers of using allegations of antisemitism to resolve differences of political approach between pro-​and anti-​Zionist Jews: Add to that that this member is a Jewish activist, the son of a Holocaust survivor, a leading member of Jewish Voices [sic] for Labour and long-​term Middle East rights activist –​and it’s pretty clear that we’re misidentifying political arguments for antisemitism.40 Milne acknowledged the potential for Jews, including anti-​Zionist Jews, to drift into language which was objectively antisemitic. He accepted that any fair disciplinary process would, in that context, lead to some complaints about Jews. He warned, however, about taking this too far: Of course, there are a very small number of Jewish people who can adopt antisemitic attitudes/​language –​just as there are a very small number of black people who use anti-​black racist tropes -​and that should be called out.41 These passages are the context to the words excised by Panorama, which are italicised in the following quote: But if we’re more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for antisemitism, something’s going wrong, and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism.42 Milne finished his letter: “Quite apart from this specific case, I think going forward we need to review where and how we’re drawing the line if we’re going to have clear and defensible processes”.43 In other words, Milne was not, as any fair watcher of the programme would have assumed that they had been accurately told, denying the possibility of antisemitism, and wrapping it up in the lesser category of “political disputes”. Rather he was warning expressly against the mistreatment of anti-​Zionist Jews. For the authors of the Panorama documentary, Milne’s email proved a key fact, which was that the leader’s officer had been interfering in disputes. At first glance, that seemed a tremendously powerful allegation, especially in the context of a media war where those watching were willing to assume the most negative explanation, namely that supporters of the left had been interfering in order to protect other socialists. But on several occasions the leader’s office had intervened to demand more stringent action.This had happened with Ken Livingstone; it had also happened to Jackie Walker who was initially cleared by an official from the Labour right before the governance and legal unit agreed to investigate a second time.44 Moreover, if we reread words cut out by Panorama, Milne was not questioning the need to investigate antisemitism; what he was saying was that doing this repeatedly against Jewish members should ring alarm bells. Panorama aired in 2019. By

The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews  129

the end of that year, 220 members of the Labour Party had been investigated for antisemitism,45 according to David Rosenberg of JVL (which had acted as the main defence campaign for those suspended), 25 of those investigated or one in eight were Jews.46 But Jews only made up one in every 250 people living in Britain. Assuming that the Jewish proportion of Labour Party member was the same as the Jewish proportion of British society, a Jewish member of the Labour Party was roughly 30 times more likely to be suspended for antisemitism than a non-​Jew. Milne wasn’t wrong to say, “something’s gone wrong”, with a process that was so skewed. For his email, Milne was presented in the press as a protector of racists. But there were reasons why Jewish members of the Labour Party were particularly likely to be aware of, and to share, criticisms of the state of Israel.What Milne was suggesting was that proposals for investigation and “disciplinary action” against a significant portion of Labour’s Jewish members were misguided. Whatever other errors the people around Corbyn made –​and previous chapters have listed far too many of them for any socialist to feel comfortable –​on this occasion, Milne was in the right and his critics misrepresenting him. It is undoubtedly the case that Jews (including anti-​Zionist Jews) can say antisemitic things: whether about themselves, about people they disagree with, or about Israeli citizens. That said, if a process was repeatedly being used to demand disciplinary action against Jewish people who have spoken out against Israel that should be a genuine reason for concern.

Notes 1 D. Rosenberg, ‘Time for Jewish Leaders to Ask the Tories Some Difficult Questions,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 30 March 2018. 2 @GregHands, Twitter, 27 March 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 3 B. Raine, ‘Jewophobia,’ Salvage, 7 January 2019. 4 D. Sabbagh, ‘Labour Adopts IHRA Antisemitism Definition in Full,’ Guardian, 4 September 2018. 5 G. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-​Israeli War of Narratives (London: Saqi, 2010), pp. 28–​35. 6 M.Weiss, ‘Israel Approves Controversial Jewish Nationality Law,’ Irish Times, 19 July 2018. 7 Baroness Neuberger criticised the bill: “It’s the direction of travel, and the fact that it demotes the status of non-​Jewish citizens of Israel, that makes it so depressing –​and, in my view, morally wrong”. J. Neuberger, Antisemitism. What It Is. What It Isn’t. Why It Matters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), p. 60. 8 ‘Scandal Erupts at Pro-​ Corbyn MP Sam Tarry’s Local Branch, Where Senior JVL Members Who Originally Nominated Him as Labour Candidate Submit an Antisemitic Motion Which He Fails to Condemn,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 21 January 2020; R. Sanders, ‘ “The Wrong Sort of Jew”: How Labour Pursued Complaints against Elderly Jewish Opponents of Israel,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 24 September 2020. 9 Sanders, ‘The Wrong Sort of Jew.’ 10 ‘JVL’s Naomi Wimborne-​Idrissi Reportedly Suspended from Labour after Rebellious Meeting of Her Local Chingford and Woodford Green Labour Party,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 3 December 2020.

130  The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews

11 A. Shlaim, ‘The Declaration that Changed History for Ever,’ Guardian, 28 June 2009; S. Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 166–​169. 12 B. Klug, Offence:The Jewish Case (London: Seagull, 2009), p. 88. 13 J. Hoffman and D. Simon, Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2019), p. 24. Talia Lavin describes a millennial Jewish education in the US, with its far greater understanding of the detail of the Holocaust but hollowed out idea of the Jews as a people with particular responsibility to root out all forms of oppression. I learned about pogroms; I played Golde in a school production of Fiddler on the Roof; I learned in excruciating detail how the long and complex and illustrious history of the Jews in Europe had dissolved in blood and gas and human ash. T. Lavin, Culture Warriors: My Journey to the Dark Web of White Supremacy (London: Monoray, 2020), pp. 13–​14. Such an education is more likely to produce radicals in rejection of it, as Jon Lansman writes, “Young people who have only known Israel as a world military super-​power allied to the US have less problem understanding antisemitism as racism”. Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 14 Hoffman and Simon, The Lives of Abbie Hoffman. 15 A. Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 267. 16 K. S. Jones,‘Michael Rosen Discusses Antisemitism,’ Politics and Insights, 29 November 2019. 17 For example, Ben Solomons (@ben_​ solomons), Twitter, 22 August 2020. Accessed 26 August 2020. 18 @richferrer, Twitter, 5 August 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 19 ‘Michael Rosen Pwns Dan Hodges AGAIN,’ Zelo Street, 27 January 2019. 20 @LMharpin, Twitter, 4 October 2019. @TheFabledAesop, Twitter, 23 October 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 21 @SCynic1, Twitter, 22 January 2019. Accessed 26 August 2020. 22 Jones, ‘Michael Rosen.’ 23 Philo, Berry, Schlosberg, Lerman, and Miller, Bad News, p. 54. 24 Panorama broadcast, ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?” 10 July 2019. 25 S. Rogers,‘BBC Panorama on Labour Antisemitism: Claims, Contributors and Reactions,’ LabourList, 10 July 2019; Panorama, ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’ at 26:50–​27:05. 26 11 July 2019. 27 B. Kentish, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s Team Repeatedly Intervened in Antisemitism Cases, Claim Labour Whistle-​Blowers in New Documentary,’ Independent, 10 July 2019; O. Bennett, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s Office DID Assess Antisemitism Complaints, Whistle-​Blowers Tell BBC Panorama,’ City A.M., 10 July 2019. 28 S. Milne, ‘The Battle for History,’ Guardian, 12 September 2002. 29 S. Milne, ‘Communism May Be Dead, but Clearly Not Dead Enough,’ Guardian, 16 February 2006. 30 J. Bloodworth, ‘Corbyn’s Pet Stalinist,’ Foreign Policy, 9 April 2019. 31 D. Rose, ‘Is the Man MPs Call “Corbyn’s Brain” the REAL Reason Labour Is Drowning in the Poison of Antisemitism? Seumas Milne, the Spin Doctor Who Promoted Palestinian Terror, Parrots Putin and Called Ira Bombers “Daring”?’ Mail on Sunday, 23 February 2019. 32 J. Daley, ‘Corbyn’s Antisemitism Crisis Proves One Thing:The Old Stalinist Gang Is Back in Charge of Labour,’ Telegraph, 31 March 2018. 33 Ware, ‘Exposed.’

The Labour right and anti-Zionist Jews  131

34 A. Baker, ‘Why Iran Believes the Militant Group ISIS Is an American Plot,’ Time, 19 July 2014. 35 ‘Strategy “Hornet’s Nest”: Snowden Confirms that Al Baghdadi Was Trained by Mossad,’ Syrian Free Press, 15 July 2014. 36 ‘Documents Released by Edward Snowden Reveal that American, British and Israeli Intelligence Agencies Worked Together to Create the Islamic State,’ Politifact, 19 August 2014. 37 J.Ware, ‘Panorama, Labour Antisemitism and the Facts that Novara Media Won’t Publish,’ Jewish Chronicle, 15 May 2020. 38 J. Ware, ‘Exposed: Lies of the Corbynites’ Leaked Dossier,’ Jewish Chronicle, 10 September 2020. 39 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014–​2019,’ Labour Party, March 2020, pp. 440–​444. 40 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit,’ pp. 440–​444. 41 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit,’ pp. 440–​444. 42 ‘UK’s Labour Party Spars with BBC over Charges of Antisemitism,’ Reuters, 10 July 2019. 43 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit,’ p. 444. 44 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit,’ pp. 338–​360, 361–​370.The same issue was discussed in the EHRC report, which gives several examples of the leadership office intervening to demand more stringent action, ans the authors accepted “in some cases, the LOTO staff interference catalysed action”; they were however extremely critical of interference, arguing that it tended to contaminate, or give the impression of contaminating, the fairness of the investigation process. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party (London: EHRC, 2020), p. 53–​55. 45 ‘Labour Party Disciplinary Processes on Antisemitism –​Statistics,’ Labour Party, January 2020. 46 ‘Circles of Solidarity and Resistance,’ David Rosenberg, 7 July 2020.

11 THE BULLYING OF LUCIANA BERGER

This subject of this chapter is the treatment of Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Wavertree, and a central figure in the crisis. The antisemitic treatment of Ms Berger began far outside the Labour Party, and not even in Britain. One of the sites whose influence has grown since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 has been the antisemitic website, the Daily Stormer. Written in a mocking, provocative tone, the magazine’s style guide to contributors calls on its writers to “dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths”. It boasts that: The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-​deprecating humour ... This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes.1 Andrew Anglin, the editor of the website, repeatedly targeted Luciana Berger, who was the subject of more than 40 articles on his site, including one calling on readers to: Call her a Jew, call her a Jew communist, call her a terrorist, call her a filthy Jew bitch. Call her a hook-​nosed yid and a rat-​faced kike. Tell her we do not want her in the UK, we do not want her or any other Jew anywhere in Europe.2 In consequence of Anglin’s obsession with Berger, she was sent numerous violent, pornographic, or antisemitic messages. At their peak in 2014, Berger was receiving more than 800 such messages a day.3 Understandably and rightly, she reported the people sending them to the police. In October 2014, Garron Helm, a

The bullying of Luciana Berger  133

member of the British terror group National Action, was imprisoned for sending offensive messages to Berger, including a yellow star superimposed on her forehead with the hashtag “Hitler was right”.4 In December 2016, one of Anglin’s followers Joshua Bonehill-​Paine, a former member of the Conservatives and the BNP, set up a blog modelled on Anglin’s (“the Daily Bale”). He was later sentenced to two years in prison for racially aggravated harassment of Berger.5 In February 2017, another supporter of the radical right, John Nimmo, made death threats against Berger, sending her a picture of a knife, warning her to “watch your back, Jewish scum” and saying, “you will get it like Jo Cox”. He too was sentenced to two years in prison.6 In July 2018, a fourth supporter of the far right, Jack Coulson, became subject to police investigation after threatening to kill Berger, saying he would “get the bitch” and “put two bullets in the back of her head”. He was later convicted of a terrorism offence.7 Anti-​fascists in Merseyside saw these incidents and used them –​rightly –​to construct a case against the far-​r ight as grotesque antisemites.8 There were long-​standing tensions, however, between Berger and the rank-​and-​ file members of her Wavertree constituency.They were on the left of the party.They were pro-​Palestinian; Berger had been a director of Labour Friends of Israel until 2010 (when she became an MP).9 She was widely regarded as a Londoner who knew little about Merseyside before being parachuted into one of the safest Labour seats in the country. It should also be recalled that she served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2015 and 2016. She had respected his position as leader, at a time when most Labour MPs were taking part in an informal strike against him. She remained in post until the attempt at removing him in summer 2016 when she was only one of more than 40 shadow ministers who resigned together to force a leadership election. In March 2018, when the mural story broke in the news, it did so because of a tweet from Luciana Berger who wrote, “I asked the Leader’s Office for an explanation about this Facebook post first thing this morning. I’m still waiting for a response”.10 The Mear One mural was the one incident which did more than anything else to remove the moral sheen of Corbyn’s leadership. A direct line could be drawn between Berger’s raising of it and the scenes four months later when, after a series of votes on Brexit, another Jewish MP Margaret Hodge attacked Corbyn in the House of Commons, reportedly saying, “You’re a fucking antisemite and a racist”.11 Corbyn’s supporters felt traduced. They wanted prominent leftists to counter-​attack against the criticisms –​and could not understand why Hodge went unpunished. Following the Mear One mural crisis, relations were strained between Luciana Berger and members of her constituency and the broader Labour left. At one low point, Berger was photographed walking to the 2018 Labour Party conference with a police officer in a fluorescent yellow jacket. The broadcaster Andrew Marr suggested to Corbyn that his own MPs needed protection from Labour supporters who might otherwise attack them.12

134  The bullying of Luciana Berger

The Corbyn-​supporting website Skwawkbox sought to prove that the story had been confected –​presumably, they implied, by Berger herself –​and approached the Merseyside police to ask if she had received protection. The police replied that certain MPs had: The force has a highly visible policing operation in place for the duration of the conference. We are continually assessing risk and as a result we have given some additional support to a number of people attending the conference.13 In a subsequent phone call between Skwawkbox and Merseyside police, the latter confirmed that Berger had been one of the people given additional support. In short, the story was true. But Skwawkbox was committed to the position that Berger must be dissembling. The site noted that the protection had been given to Berger outside the conference, that is, not in the zone to which access was controlled by security passes and where there were already dozens of policemen and guards. The website told its readers, “Ms Berger has required no protection in the Conference, but appears to have been allocated a couple of officers to walk out with her and presumably accompany her to her transport”. From there, they concluded that Ms Berger had lied.14 Berger’s critics on the left maintained that it was ridiculous to think that she might fear for her safety from supporters of the Labour Party while in the vicinity of the conference when the only threats to her safety had come from the far right.15 And it is true that the only people to have been prosecuted for making death threats to her were supporters of the right. But it is not the case that by September 2018, the only people to have used violent language against her came from the far right. Two of Berger’s critics on the left had also been convicted of offences against her: prior to 2018, Philip Hayes, the founder of Liverpool music venue The Picket, had spoken to Berger about Gaza, when drunk. He said, “All Jewish people have money”. Hayes referred to the prime minister of Israel as “your Prime Minister”, and said, “I fucking hate Jewish people”. Hayes later apologised for his words but was convicted of a public order offence.16 Pausing on this incident, many left-​wing people seem to still believe that anti-​ Zionist and antisemitic language is rigorously separate and that those steeped in left-​wing culture always recognise the distinction and never cross the line between the two. It is hard to see how that “never” could survive an incident such as this. Hayes was a part of the left, shaped by an anti-​racist and antifascist culture. His venue had repeatedly hosted South African and Zimbabwean artists from as early as June 1990, when South Africa was still subject to white minority rule.17 The other instance of criminal harassment of Berger from the left occurred in March 2018, at about the same time that the MP publicised the Mear One mural and was still before the courts when the conference took place. A Labour activist Nick Nelson sent messages to two Jewish women MP, Luciana Berger, and Ruth Smeeth. He told Smeeth she was a “red Tory traitor” and Berger that she was a “vile

The bullying of Luciana Berger  135

useless Tory c**t” who was “using Judaism as a weapon”. He pleaded guilty to two offences of harassment and was given a suspended prison sentence.18 When the story of Berger’s attendance at the conference and police support for her was publicised, prominent pro-​Corbyn voices denounced Berger in lurid terms. Lee Jasper, once Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities to the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone, responded to a photograph of Luciana Berger beside a police officer: What total and utter bullshit. It’s pure propaganda @lucianaberger has shamed the party, disgraced herself and the party. There was no formal police assessment and no evidence to support the claim she was under threat. It’s a stunt.19 More than 400 people liked Lee Jasper’s tweet. The Labour left assumed bad faith when we would have done better to offer sympathy and emotional intelligence. By this stage, four supporters of the extreme right had been sent to prison for sending hate messages to Berger. She had received thousands of threats, to which now could be added an increasingly violent, hostile language from supporters of her own party. By February 2019, when Berger left the Labour Party, the situation had deteriorated beyond repair. She spoke in the House of Commons about her treatment by Corbyn supporters and complained that, in Labour, “There are people who have accused me of having two masters. They have said that I am Tel Aviv’s servant, and called me a paid-​up Israeli operative”. She posted the content of her speech on Twitter,20 and it was shared widely, including on pro-​Corbyn websites. These were responses on one pro-​Corbyn Facebook page, “Jeremy Corbyn –​True Socialism” (each of these comments were written by different posters): Deselect her. We don’t want bare face traitors here Ms Berger don’t bother to apologise, just fucking go and join the Tories; it’s where you belong Another minger who needs kicking out. Did you take the Israeli bribes? If not, why no outcry, no indignation about a foreign state interfering in the British parliament? Strange how ONLY ONE Minority Group has almost a TOTAL Disproportionate MONOPOLY on the free reign of benefits gained from so called Race hate Propaganda This is a well organised plot within Labour supported by right wing media rags and the BBC to smear Corbyn. These enemies within should be deselected.21 There were many similar comments, several of them alluding to Berger’s Jewishness. If there was a way of disagreeing with Berger in relation to Corbyn, while also showing her solidarity for having survived a torrent of hatred from the

136  The bullying of Luciana Berger

Anglo-​American far right, the Labour left needed to find it –​and failed. Worse than that, some leftists joined in the abuse. There were one or two exceptions to this general approach of condemning Berger and accusing her of lying. At the same Labour Party conference, delegates from Wavertree CLP approached Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, seeking his advice on what they should do. He told them that from his point of view, she had been one of the more cooperative and constructive Liverpool MPs in her role as Mental Health spokesperson, and it would not help Corbyn in dealing with antisemitism if she was a target for deselection. This too was leaked to Skwawkbox, whereupon Lansman, despite his prominent role on the Labour left, became subject to criticism. “Jon Lansman has also been involved in controversy”, the website’s readers were informed, accusing him of failing to stand up to media stories of Labour’s crisis.22 An attempt to build bridges and de-​escalate the crisis was interpreted through a factional lens. The idea of a compromise was denounced when it should have been supported. Lansman was unpopular with the likes of Skwawkbox because he, to a great extent than any other prominent Corbyn supporter, had spoken out against Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson, causing one Momentum supporter Jade Aziz to write that “The real battle for Labour’s soul” posed “Lansmanites” (those willing to acknowledge that Labour had a problem) against “cranks” (presumably, those incapable of admitting that fact).23 One of the awkward features of Skwawkbox’s criticisms of Lansman was that this allegation of factional impropriety was also being made against perhaps the most senior Jewish supporter of Corbyn within the Labour Party. In an atmosphere where antisemitism was present, it was depressingly easy for readers to see Lansman not as someone who disagreed with them but as someone who was different from them, not the true Labour leftist he pretended to be but a Jew.24 Directly beneath the Skwawkbox article, readers of the website set out their accounts of Jewish conspiracy. One contributor, “Wirral in It Together”, named Lansman as one of the Zionists, and as a chief conduit by which “Israeli funds” were coming into the party: The Lansman snide [sic] would happily keep the Blairites and see the Tories safely back into power. I’m assuming there will be dirty Tory /​hedge fund /​ banker /​Israeli funds behind this and desirous of the status quo.25 “Jack T” agreed: Many are asking how much control and just how far have Zionist agents of Israel infiltrated their way into the Party machine? 26 A moderator from Skwawkbox wrote, “As for any antisemitic comments here, they’ll be removed if seen or drawn to my attention”, but allowed these comments to remain.27

The bullying of Luciana Berger  137

The sociologist and historian of racism and anti-​racism Alana Lentin has warned the left of the danger of making anti-​racist solidarity “contingent on political alignments”,28 but this is exactly what happened in Berger’s case. Corbyn supporters saw Berger’s record of support for Israel and the Labour right and made them the determining factor in how they treated her. Because of their assumptions about her, they could not acknowledge her history as the victim of far-​r ight attacks or prevent anti-​Jewish racism from insinuating into left-​wing online spaces. Berger was criticised for objecting to behaviour which treated her as a “traitor” and as a “cancer”29 within her party. She was blamed for raising the question of the mural and shaming Corbyn and the Labour left. One of the reasons why the law has a concept of victimisation is to protect people from abuse, where they are criticised not so much for being black or Asian or Jewish, but for having complained about discriminatory behaviour. It is worth bearing that concept in mind when thinking of the people who accepted that Berger had received threats and required a police escort but denounced her for having criticised Corbyn. So, for example, Vox Political’s Mike Sivier insisted that any threats encountered by Berger at the Labour Party conference were, ultimately, her own fault: Luciana Berger: Is the reason she needs a bodyguard the fact that she lied about her leader? You reap what you sow, I suppose.30 Sivier went on, “by raising false and easily-​disproved allegations of antisemitism, they [Jewish MPs] have actually increased the danger of antisemitic attacks on Jewish MPs”.31 Berger had not merely complained in general about antisemitism in the Labour Party; more specifically than that, she had in spring 2018 reminded her Twitter followers of what had been a dormant news story of Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Mear One’s mural. Without her bringing the story back into the public eye, a tranche of Corbyn supporters seemed to believe, the Labour leader would not have been compelled to apologise, the “Enough is Enough” demonstration would never have taken place, and all Labour’s difficulties would have been averted. It was this misplaced feeling of injustice that operated on the minds of supporters of the left, causing them to denounce Berger, insult her, and demand that she be punished. People were calling down violence on another human being while telling themselves that they –​and not she –​were the victims. On the Labour right, a different analysis predominated. Berger was not being attacked for having complained about antisemitism. More simply, she was attacked as a Jewish MP. The Jewish Chronicle highlighted the presence within leading roles in her Constituency Labour Party of individuals whose public language appeared to have crossed the line into antisemitic language. The most controversial figure was Alex Scott-​Samuel, the chair of Wavertree CLP in 2018–​19, who had appeared on the Richie Allen show, which was for a time hosted on the website of the antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke. Richie Allen’s other guests had included the musician Gilad Atzmon, whose history of incendiary remarks is set out in a later

138  The bullying of Luciana Berger

chapter, Mark Collett, formerly of the BNP, and Alison Chabloz who had been convicted for two counts of sending an offensive, indecent, or menacing message through a public communications network and received a 20-​week suspended sentence after putting up on her own websites songs in which she claimed the survivors of Holocaust were liars motivated by financial gain.32 Discussing these songs with Chabloz, Allen called them, “satirical, they’re very funny, they’re very good I think”.33 Scott-​Samuel spoke to Allen in 2015 on “No State Should Force Parents to Vaccinate Their Children” and in February 2017 on the privatisation of the National Health Service (NHS). Much of what Scott-​Samuel said on the second occasion would have been uncontroversial to a left-​wing audience: he condemned Margaret Thatcher’s government for selling off council houses; he defended Corbyn from criticisms that he had been pusillanimous in the face of the Labour right. He had been invited to defend the NHS and by and large Scott-​Samuel held to this brief. However, in the course of the first interview, Scott-​Samuel said, I was reading a very interesting article yesterday about the Rothschild family who are behind a lot of the neo-​liberal influence in the UK and the US and I mean you only have to google them to look at this. Ever since they funded the Napoleonic Wars and made enormous profits about just over 200 years ago, they’ve had a quiet vested interest in the pursuit of free trade and neo-​ liberalism etc. Richie Allen’s producers illustrated these words with images from conspiracist sites: “George Soros and the Rothschilds Connection” and “Only 3 countries left w/​o ROTHSCHILD Central Bank!”34 Strangely enough, the thought did not seem to occur to Scott-​Samuel that if the Rothschilds really had been promoting neoliberalism ever since the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, they cannot have been very successful plotters –​given that more than 150 years had to pass before neoliberal politics or government actually began. In February 2019, Alex Scott-​Samuel complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) about an article in the Mail on Sunday which had written up his presence in the programme in a lurid manner, describing Scott-​ Samuel as the MP’s “tormentor” and maintained there was a “secret link” between him and Corbyn (the two men having met briefly to discuss what Scott-​Samuel believed was the unfair treatment of anti-​Zionists in the Labour Party). Scott-​ Samuel explained that he was Jewish and said that he was “hurt and offended by the allegations … that I am antisemitic or a conspiracy theorist”. His complaint failed, however, with IPSO finding the report that the impression given by the newspaper had not been “significantly misleading”.35 From the point of view of discrimination law (a matter not litigated before IPSO), Scott-​Samuels’s defence was beside the point. We do not have a category

The bullying of Luciana Berger  139

“the non-​discriminator”, who as a result of their commitment to virtue and justice is protected from any complaint. The clash between Wavertree CLP and Luciana Berger weakened the left and diminished our moral standing. In our online existence, political people are expected to hold views on everything: on the politics of race and of gender, an idea of whom we want to lead political parties, a vision of what the left or the Labour Party might do should we ever again hold significant institutional power. Although each of these disputes can seem an island unto itself, they actually are not. Though the struggle between the Labour left and right for leadership of that party seemed of defining importance, at some point it was always going to end. Afterwards, there were always going to be left-​wing people, knocking on the doors of British Jews, and asking for their support (whether to vote for a particular candidate, or to join a protest). Who could blame anyone, if they were to respond to the left and say: why should I help you, when I remember how you treated Luciana Berger?

Notes 1 J. Moore,‘The Daily Stormer’s Playbook toTurn People into Nazis,’ GQ, 14 December 2017. 2 ‘Joshua Bonehill-​Paine Sentenced to an Additional Two Years in Prison for Antisemitic Harassment,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 8 December 2016. 3 ‘Luciana Berger and the Two Minutes Hate,’ Half Chips/​Half Rice, 23 April 2019. 4 M. Wendling, Alt Right: From 4chan to the White House (London: Pluto, 2018), p. 131. 5 E. Palmer, ‘Neo-​Nazi Troll Jailed for Online Hate Campaign against Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger,’ International Business Times, 8 December 2016. 6 B. Pitt,‘Has the Labour Left Subjected Luciana Berger to Hate Speak and Death Threats?’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 20 March 2019. 7 L. Harpin, ‘Jailed Nazi-​Obsessed Teenager Boasted He Wanted to Kill Jewish MP,’ Jewish Chronicle, 19 July 2018. 8 ‘They Shall Not Pass! Stop the White Man March in Liverpool,’ Merseyside Anti-​Fascist Network, 20 July 2015. 9 D. Rosenberg, ‘Luciana Berger and Wavertree –​Some Background and Updates,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 11 February 2019. 10 @lucianaberger, Twitter, 23 March 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 11 Jones, This Land, p. 241. 12 ‘Luciana Berger and the Two Minutes Hate.’ 13 ‘Full Story: Luciana B Had No Protection IN #Lab18. No Response Why Record Not Put Straight,’ Skwawkbox, 26 September 2018. 14 ‘Full Story: Luciana B,’ Skwawkbox. 15 B. Pitt,‘Has the Labour Left Subjected Luciana Berger to Hate Speak and Death Threats?’ Medium, 20 March 2019. 16 ‘Luciana Berger, Jewish MP, Subject to Antisemitic Tirade, Abuser Philip Hayes Found Guilty and Fined,’ Huffpost, 9 January 2013. 17 ‘Milestones,’ Save the Picket, 6 October 2003. 18 L. Harpin, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Supporter Sentenced for Vile Abuse against Jewish MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth,’ Jewish Chronicle, 10 December 2018. 19 ‘Luciana Berger and the Two Minutes Hate.’ 20 20 February 2019.

140  The bullying of Luciana Berger

21 ‘Luciana Berger and the Two Minutes Hate.’ 22 ‘Wavertree Members: “Lansman Offered to Mediate to Persuade Us to Keep Luciana”,’ Skwawkbox, 30 July 2019; email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 23 J. Azim, ‘The Real Battle for Labour’s Soul? Lansmanites vs Cranks,’ LabourList, 8 August 2018. 24 For other instances of antisemitic attacks on Lansman, ‘Momentum Should Side with the Jews over the Racists,’ Camden New Journal, 30 August 2018. 25 ‘Wavertree Members.’ 26 ‘Wavertree Members.’ 27 ‘Wavertree Members.’ 28 A. Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p. 153. 29 ‘Luciana Berger and the Two Minutes Hate.’ 30 ‘Jewish MPs Who Whipped Up Fake ‘Antisemitism’ Claims against Labour Want Bodyguards for Party Conference,’ Vox Political, 28 August 2018. 31 ‘Jewish MPs Who Whipped.’ 32 ‘Alison Chabloz Has Antisemitic Songs Conviction Upheld,’ BBC News, 13 February 2019. 33 S. Cooke, ‘Richie Allen: Purveyor of Holocaust Denial,’ Medium, 8 June 2019. 34 L. Harpin, ‘Luciana Berger’s Former Constituency Labour Party to Debate Affiliating to JVL,’ Jewish Chronicle, 8 January 2020; ‘Dr Alex Scott-​Samuel: “No State Should Force Parents to Vaccinate Their Children”,’ Richie Allen Show, 22 April 2015, at 19:05. 35 Decision of the Complaints Committee 01511–​19 Scott-​Samuel v The Mail on Sunday.

12 FIGHTING THE RICH, WITHOUT FIGHTING JEWS

In March 2019, after Berger had left the Labour Party, the Guardian’s John Harris wrote a column seeking to explain how it was that Labour had been unable to successfully confront antisemitism within its own ranks. His argument explained the problem as one of ideology. In his reasoning, unwelcome as the thought may be, there just are points at which the ideas of social democracy and far-​r ight populism overlap. At the heart of the various strands of populism that have taken root in many countries over the past five years, you will find not just a supposed divide between “the people” and an elite, but a deep conviction that the latter is mired in corruption.1 Since the 2016 referendum, Harris argued, Labour had imbibed some of the same values. In particular, Corbyn’s electoral message had been styled as a left populism: [Labour] now tends to present the very real failings of modern capitalism not as a matter of anything systemic, but the work of ... what Corbyn calls a “self-​serving elite”, who “monopolise the wealth that should be shared by each and every one of us”.2 Harris is a social democrat, and in the range of Guardian contributors, a left-​wing one. He was the sort of writer who might have been expected to admire Corbyn. He was not saying that the far left and far right cohere. He was simply saying that in an epoch of populist advance, there were reasons why antisemites might be attracted to a radical left project with the consequence that the partisans of that project would need to work hard to exclude them.

142  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

Many writers on the left responded that Harris was simply wrong and unfair.3 The argument of this chapter is that his ideas can in fact be taken in one of two directions, towards a vision of a more principled and activist left, or towards an argument that seeks to discredit any radical-​left opinions in any way critical of capitalism.

2015–​20 and the pre-​history of fascism In terms of the history of ideas, there is a comparison which can be drawn between Harris’s argument and the ideas of Hannah Arendt, and of Zeev Sternhell, a historian of fascism and the far right who was until his death an Israel citizen at the far left of that country’s politics. Arendt’s 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, includes a chapter on leftist antisemitism. Arendt acknowledges the reality of that phenomenon but ascribes it to Europe’s distant past. She argues that up until 1900, there was a battle at the heart of the nascent socialist movement between those who saw life from the perspective of the urban proletariat and those who saw it through the eyes of the lower middle classes.To thrive in businesses, the shopkeeper depended on banks, from which they borrowed at a punitive rate of interest. There grew up therefore a violent hatred of bankers, which became a hatred of Jews. A key moment in Arendt’s account is the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish artillery officer in the French army was accused of being a traitor, and a mass movement of hundreds of thousands of people emerged to demand that he be jailed and then remain imprisoned. The story of the Dreyfus is central to the history of modern Judaism. It is the event which caused Theodor Herzl to write The Jewish State and launch the Zionist movement. But if Herzl saw it as a proof of the eternal hostility of gentiles to Jews, in Arendt’s account, the story was something else, a crisis pitting two groups of socialists against each other. The victory of the pro-​Dreyfus cause was accompanied by the triumph of those who would base the society of the future not on the middle class but on industrial workers.4 It followed that so long as the latter (Marxists) remained in the ascendant then, whatever other faults the left manifested, antisemitism would be a marginal part of it. In a series of books, which continued until his recent death, Zeev Sternhell argued that the conventional view of fascism, that it emerged in 1920s Italy, in Mussolini’s head, and spread throughout Europe, was too simple. Fascism had in fact emerged roughly 30 years earlier, at the time (once again) of the Dreyfus affair. Sternhell’s interest was in those who lost, the anti-​Dreyfusards. Despite their defeat, he argued, they were the coming force in European history. The affair led to the formation of “new generation of intellectuals [which] rose violently against the rationalist individualism of liberal society”. French intellectuals absorbed and then synthesised socialism and nationalism and created a new ideology, “a socialism without the proletariat”.5 Sternhell has been criticised in many places. He exaggerates the significance of these French movements to the subsequent development of Italian and German

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  143

fascism. He overplays the role of ideas in the history of fascism which was an action-​and goal-​oriented movement which raided ideas from the other movements around it. In speaking of how a generation of affluent reactionaries tried to keep hold of the support of a generation of lower middle-​class Radicals who had been spurned by the left, he labels them “socialists”. In so doing, he fails to historicise the left, which in the aftermath of the rise of German Social Democracy was plainly a coming force in Europe so that even its enemies felt obliged to borrow some of its arguments. To look at a milieu of autocrats, defenders of the power of the pre-​revolutionary French monarchy and of the established Catholic Church, and to describe the people belonging to this world as “socialists” is to do considerable damage to the normal meaning of that term. Yet what Sternhell helps us to understand is a moment in some ways like our own times. During the 1890s and early 1900s far-​right ideas grew quickly. Supporters of conventional right-​wing politics grew disillusioned with their own opinions and then became ideologically footloose, and enthused by the support they received, some turned momentarily towards a select number of left-​wing ideas, before breaking with them too, and finding a longer-​term home in a cobbled-​ together synthesis of left-​wing and far-​r ight ideas. Although Sternhell was a historian of fascism, the most interesting people in his narrative are not the fascists themselves, but those who did the ideological preparatory work for them, and whose works then proved susceptible to co-​option by future generations of the far right. A key part was played by thinkers such as Georges Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence promoted a mythic conception of politics, in which the idea of the general strike would lead the working class to victory. Sorel, who died in 1922, before the movements he had championed had had much opportunity to hold power, was a class-​struggle anarchist, a post-​war admirer of both Lenin and Mussolini.6 Such politics, which glorified insurgency but was reckless about who did it, was a grim legacy to leave and should be resisted in its contemporary incarnations as well.

Occupy and Mear One If we are looking for an equivalent of Sorel in the last decade then the appropriate counterpart is not any individual but a social movement –​the Occupy campaign which began at Wall Street in September 2011 and reached London four weeks later. Occupy was undoubtedly anti-​capitalist, but its critique of the system was protean. If you were listening carefully, you could find among the movement’s ranks Marxists, admirers of Bakunin and Proudhon, followers of the antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke, as well as “heirs of Magna Carta”,7 who believed that by insisting on rights supposedly set down in law in 1297, they could defeat any changes to the law since then. Amongst the Proudhonist ideas which flourished in Occupy was the demand to replace money and the capitalist relations which underpin it with vouchers representing equal units of labour time. Symbolically, and actually, we were being invited to recreate the politics and organising techniques of the

144  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

nineteenth century socialism which was characterised by Arendt as the revolt of the small trader against the banker. Meanwhile, other ideas came to Britain via Occupy Wall Street from the libertarian right, which criticised the Federal Reserve and the banking system in the name of a purer capitalism, liberated from the malevolent influence of Jewish finance. The camp’s first main banner, hoisted in October 2011, read “Capitalism is Crisis”.8 Its replacement, two months later, “Root out usury”, marked a step backwards towards a kind of logic that blamed unjust bankers rather than the capitalist system and which was vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking.9 The historian Jerry Muller sets out the history of that term, usury. Deuteronomy 23:19 prohibits Jews and Christians from lending money at interest to their brother but not from charging interest of a foreigner. By the Second Lateran Council in 1139, the convention had emerged that all men were brothers, and a Christian should never lend at interest. That evil was prevented by allowing Jews to lend money. It was better, argued Pope Nicholas V, that “this people should perpetrate usury than that Christians should engage in it”. As capitalism grew from the seventeenth century the prohibition on usury died out. Bit by bit, the lending of money ceased to carry its old ethnic association. And yet the memory of Jews’ role as medieval bankers persisted for centuries, leaving Jews as what Muller terms, “a kind of metaphor-​turned flesh for capitalism”.10 One individual who incarnates the influence of Occupy is the American artist Mear One, who had been a street artist in the hip hop scene of 1980s Los Angeles and had contributed to anti-​war art tours before being invited to East London to paint his mural. In Mear One’s account the design was simply the transportation to Britain of the politics of Occupy Los Angeles, from the birth of that movement to its defeat by the police: Over the course of this year-​long movement my experiences helped to crystallise my post 9/​11 thinking on global politics and the economic slave system, deepening my knowledge of fractional-​reserve lending and other banking schemes that led to the collapse of the markets in 2008.11 Mear One explained that on his flight to London he had sketched out his plans for a mural “inspired by these recent real-​world events”.12 Occupy LA was launched in September 2011; its camp was evicted by the police in November 2011, and through summer and autumn 2012, the campaign was still holding meetings, doing chalk-​outs and prisoner solidarity work.13 It is more than plausible to think that these events were still fresh in his mind, as Mear began work on the mural in September 2012. In autumn 2018, after he had become a figure of contempt in the British press, Mear One published a manifesto, The War on Art. The pamphlet includes several reworking of the mural. In one of them its title, Freedom for Humanity, is printed on a dustbin lid, changed into a shield in the hands of an anti-​capitalist demonstrator, who is also equipped with a can of spray-​paint. The manifesto name-​ checks a series of figures familiar from the story of left-​wing engagement with

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  145

art: the feminist and civil rights activist Audrey Lorde, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, and the German theologian and anti-​fascist Pastor Niemöller. It seeks justification in the sounds of hip-​hop, punk rock, and the style of graffiti art. In a nod to malign fantasies blaming mobile phone technology for cancers and other disease, it asks, “Do you know how thrilling it is to walk down the streets nowadays and see others pointing out the Chemtrails of the evil 5G Network wifi emitters?” It includes, albeit as a subordinate theme when compared to his original artwork, masonic eyes, Jewish stars (with the words, “false sense of identity”), and references to the illuminati. “I am the broken generation, rising from my ashes”, Mear One writes.14 The ideas are a mixture: specific and mystical, hopeful and despairing, both left and right. This kind of politics was not unique to 2012 (when the mural was painted) or to the mural crisis of 2018. You can see something similar at work in misguided attempts to downplay the Holocaust in order to play up social processes likely to result in suffering, for example, global warming.15 You could see it again in summer 2020 in protests which brought together ecological-​minded hippies, members of an ill-​defined counterculture, and white nationalists blaming the Covid “pandemic” on the malicious work of an imagined deep state.16

Anti-​capitalism left and right Sternhell alerts us to the possibility of people making a two-​step journey from the centre or right to the left and then to the far right. A similar trajectory could be traced in the emergence on social media of people who insisted they were Corbyn supporters while sharing posts denouncing Jews as traitors to the left. When people drifted in that way, further steps could be imagined. Either their antisemitism would be argued out of them or, at some point, they would get bored with Labour, and any number of right-​wing positions might become attractive to them. Sternhell writes of a history of attempts to revise Marxism, by injecting into it some other ideas that would blunt its radical edge and make such politics more acceptable to the majority of people (ethical Socialism, Darwinian notions of progress, etc.). This is a useful way to understand, for example, French or Italian left politics, inside which Marxism has been hegemonic at certain moments (ca. 1920, ca. 1950), only to be dethroned, setting other non-​socialist traditions in motion. But it does not map easily onto the history of British socialism, inside which Marxism was a minority current even in 1920 or 1950, and the dominant ideas even on the left of Labour have been a mix of pacifism, ethical socialism, and the desire for economic distribution.These, of course, are the ideas that Corbyn himself exemplified: Marx-​curious, but not Marxist. Marxism is a coherent notion of global politics, which explains developments within the economy, society, and politics. Marxists might tip into racist ways of thinking, but –​when they did so –​this was a clear breach with their previous politics and could be criticised through a shared language which both the non-​racist majority and the defaulting individual accepted. If the Corbyn majority had all

146  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

been the card-​carrying Marxists of liberal fantasy, it would not have prevented any occurrence at all of conspiratorial thinking but it would have made it far easier for other socialists to challenge its expression.

Populism –​sentimental or socialist? In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn repeatedly spoke of capitalism as a “rigged system”, a description of politics, business, and the economy in which wealth and power were in the wrong hands. This was a specific phrase: it had been used by the American radical Bernie Sanders in his challenge for the Democratic nomination, then plundered by Donald Trump, to justify his economic nationalism. Corbyn was trying to reverse the process by which racist white populists had appealed to voters who favoured economic redistribution and take back this language for the left.17 One in six of those who had voted for UKIP in the 2015 general election switched to the Labour Party in 2017.18 But what Labour gained with one hand, it lost within another. The new voters came in 2017 and went in 2019. They left behind only online warriors and the ideas that accompanied them –​conspiracy theories and antisemitism. It is worth asking why this concept of a rigged system has proved so amenable to antisemitism and why this was the case, so clearly between 2016 and 2019. For it is a theme of this book that although antisemitism was present in global politics after 2016, beforehand it was latent and almost invisible.You might encounter it at the edges of global politics, or in outsider campaigns such as Occupy, but the main players of the left and right knew to avoid it. After 2016 that changed. What was happening, in the sphere of economics, to reinforce it? On the left, we have two main stories which explain how the economy has changed in recent years, and how this has been particularly fertile to the right. The first is the idea of neoliberalism, namely the Reagan and Thatcher’s election victories, the global economy being characterised by a refusal by the rich to pay higher taxes, privatisation of large parts of the economy, and the defeat of trade unions and other mass organisations which pressed for increased welfare spending.The share of global wealth going to labour has shrunk and the proportion owned by capital has risen. Debt has increased, and it benefits the bank while disciplining workers and forcing them to pay more to obtain education, housing, and care for themselves, their children, and their parents.19 The second is the idea of race welfarism, namely, that after the 2008 global banking crisis voters decided in large numbers that the age of welfare expansion was over. Therefore in so far as they personally relied on the state to subsidise their homes or employment, it could be guaranteed in future only by reducing the supply of welfare competitors, in other words, migrants, or reducing the access to welfare benefits for racial outsiders.20 Other processes could also be listed: in America and Europe, from 2016 onwards, trade21 and growth in the economy were shrinking. Real wages had

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  147

fallen, and public services disintegrated.22 Barriers to accumulation (including ecological limits to indefinite expansion) were becoming more apparent. It had been evident for some time that for a rich person seeking to expand the wealth of, say, a hundred million pounds, the most effective way to do it was not (in contrast to the 1950s or 1960) buying a business, making goods, or selling services, but investing in rent-​seeking behaviour by other capitalists (e.g., by simply buying shares in the giant tech businesses, much of whose profit came from selling advertising space online). If millions of people believed that capitalism had become a series of nationally competing states, if what they saw was a modern-​day equivalent to the old corruption of centuries past in which democracy had been reduced to a series of opportunities for politically connected people to graft and gain at everyone else’s expense, those perceptions were not wrong. The problem was that it was easy to turn this dissatisfaction with the world into a kind of conspiratorialism in which class was written out of the picture. Therefore merely saying that Labour would criticise elites was inadequate as any sort of means for making populists into socialists. If you looked carefully at Corbyn’s speeches, in the six months that led up to the June 2017 election, you could see two different narratives of popular discontent being used at once. The first was the idea that the British people was suffering and that its enemy was a vague and ill-​definite set of “elites” or “the few” (as opposed to “the many”): Our Westminster system is broken and our economy is rigged. Both are run in the interests of the few. Labour is under attack because we are standing up to the elites who are determined to hijack Brexit to pay even less tax and take even more of the wealth we all create.23 In the same speech, Corbyn attempted to say that the whole British people had shared common interests –​leaving the rich as a tiny exception to the great majority: Labour will not allow the Tories to put their party interests ahead of the real national interest; the interests of the British people.24 The problem with these formulations was their vagueness as to who required to be cast down. For the rich are held up not merely by their own presence in society but by the active support of those closest to them, the people who work in financial services servicing those with high net wealth, senior managers, professional landlords, and so on. They are held up as well by much wider sets of ideas, the belief that rich people must have done something to earn their wealth, by ideology and those who manufacture it, by deference, and the fear of demanding “too much”. At other times, in the same speeches, Corbyn made his words specific. He identified the wealthy, named them in person, brought out the links between them and

148  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

press, and made it clear that what he was fighting was simply the rich, and them above all: In the last year, Britain’s 1,000 richest people have seen their wealth rise by 14 per cent to £658 billion –​that’s nearly six times the budget of our NHS. Imagine the outcry if public sector workers put in for a 14 per cent pay rise.25 This was the sorts of anti-​capitalist politics that was Corbyn at its best: a language that used class openly and untainted by any possible antisemitic association. The less “populist” and more “socialist” he became, the better Corbyn’s politics were –​ not just more effective at winning voters, but better protected against anti-​Jewish distortion.

Voters and members This book does not criticise Corbyn for being an anti-​capitalist or for looking for a way of winning over right-​wing voters. The problem was the way in which his populism and his socialism were all jumbled up together. Under his leadership, the Labour Party never had a plan to deepen a Labour identification among footloose older, socially conservative but economically redistributionist voters. In the past, Labour might have relied on the unions to train their members in social democracy, but the unions are a shell of the movements they once were. If not unions, then Labour Party meetings might be expected to do the same job. Indeed, supporters of the Labour left often insist that it was very rare indeed to find attacks on Jews being made, even codedly, in public meetings. Unfortunately, rare does not mean completely unknown. Take, for example, the meeting of Labour’s NEC in July 2018, at which one Corbyn supporter Peter Willsman demanded that Labour turn the fire on its critics: They can falsify social media very easily. And some of these people in the Jewish community support Trump –​they are Trump fanatics and all the rest of it.26 That idea of Jews as not just the falsifiers of documents but secretly Trump’s keenest supporters must have stuck in Willsman’s mind, because he immediately repeated it: I am not going to be lectured to by Trump fanatics making up duff information without any evidence at all. So, I think we should ask the 70 rabbis where is your evidence of severe and widespread antisemitism in this Party?27 But let us assume that incidents such as these were rare.That attacks on Jewish people were far more common on social media than in person. And that Constituency Labour Parties remained an open and welcoming space.

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  149

This emphasis on meetings reflects a “democratic” conception of the Labour Party going back to the left of the 1980s in which Labour exists as a series of constituency meetings, at which positions are taken, and through them policy is adopted upwards, with the Labour conference acting as the party’s supreme decision-​making body, and Labour leaders, MP, the NEC, are merely the servants of Labour democratic structures. A number of fraternal criticisms could be made of this understanding of the Labour Party: it portrays how Labour should not be how Labour is. It gives conference and CLP meetings an overwhelming role in determining policy, whereas most non-​members of the Labour Party experience Labour in a mediated form: through television, the press, and online, where MPs and the leader are given a predominant importance. In reality, there is clash between two conceptions of the Labour Party –​ a democratic and a managerial one –​and Labour is formed by each of them and (especially between 2015 and 2019) by the conflict between these two conceptions. Another criticism of the democratic model is that it provides no conceptual space for an individual member or supporter of the Labour to shape what “Labour” is except by attending CLP meetings. The reality of Labour membership is that only a minority of members has ever attended CLP meetings, and under Corbyn’s leadership the membership trebled. Also, while the number of people attending meetings also grew more slowly, the gap between the number of Labour Party members and those attending meetings actually widened. In the democratic conception of how Labour operates, the gap was regrettable and a problem but of no ultimate significance, since if people were not going to meetings then they were ultimately paper-​members whose views could be discounted. Yet a proportion of Labour’s new recruits –​including the new category of supporters who signed up online to vote in the leadership contest –​conducted their politics predominantly online rather than offline. During elections, they arranged to canvass through friendship circles or through websites such as My Nearest Marginal.28 They talked to other people on social media or on the comment threads of outrider sites. Such people require to be integrated into any compelling account of what Labour was –​both when these passive members were taking actions which everyone in Labour could agree were to be supported (e.g., when they signed up to canvas for Labour candidates) and when they debated politics on social media. For good or for ill, they too were part of the Labour Party and helped to make Labour what it was. Through this book, I have spoken about the role of online communication as the main location of antisemitic discourse. This is not to say that social media caused people to hold racist ideas about Jews; all the platforms did was to enable people to speak (a lot) to a much wider number of people at once, sometimes with care and sometimes without. Most members of the Labour Party, certainly most of those caught up in the crisis had not been born digital, had started using computers only as adults, and they spoke without inhibition online, as if they were among small gatherings of friends in a pub. They seemed not to grasp that their words

150  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

would stay there for all time. I do not write this in order to let people blame social media for their own malice. The surveys quoted earlier in this book suggest that tens of millions of British people believe stereotypes about Jews; for most Labour members, the acquisition of those ideas must have predated Facebook or Twitter. But to understand what was happening we need to grasp that technology had changed, and people’s consciousness was still struggling to catch up with it. If we think about such malign and unpleasant behaviours as trolling as a general pattern of behaviour separated from any antisemitic content, the reality is that almost everyone is capable of bullying online, both the left and the right, including people who have on other occasions been its victims.29 No one protects themselves from bullying others by thinking that because they support Palestine or because they oppose antisemitism, they are a good person and therefore incapable of bullying anyone else. That assumption only makes the conduct more likely. Under Corbyn, parts of the Labour movement were beginning to think about community organising, a project which would include treating this periphery of new members as a set of people to be organised in social movements. The idea was to involve people in shared activities, against closures of libraries or swimming pools or other public amenities. Corbyn’s pitch in 2015 had been that he would treat Labour as a movement, that conception both incorporated and relegated online activism. The party recruited organisers, while Momentum’s full-​time employees included people tasked with setting up Momentum branches across the UK. No one, however, was teaching members of the Party how to mentor new online joiners –​or how to talk with them when they used aggressive or humiliating words. The task of challenging such behaviour was given not to the membership as a whole but relatively to the small number of full-​time employees in Labour’s disciplinary apparatus.

A homage to the absent Marxists Where did Corbyn’s populist turn leave Labour or Britain’s Jews? Another Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, went further than Harris. He began by noting that the antisemitism you saw in Labour online rarely had anything to do with Israel or Palestine, “It’s all bankers and Rothschilds, control of the media and Holocaust denial”. Why was the left vulnerable to such ideas? [A]‌ntisemitism is populism in perhaps its purest and most distilled form. It says that politics is indeed a battle between the virtuous masses and a nefarious, corrupt elite –​and that that elite is “the Jews”.30 By “populism”, Freedland had in mind a very wide set of targets –​not merely the likes of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán but any number of left-​ wing movements: the Bernie Sanders campaign, Syriza, Podemos, and so on. It is hard to see what, if anything, these groups shared. Certainly, few of these other

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  151

left-​wing parties have faced anything like the difficulties Labour has suffered with antisemitism.31 Corbyn’s criticisms of capitalism, Freedland noted, did not relate principally to the economic structures in which they operated (capitalism). In his populist moments, Freedland argued, Corbyn’s critique of the affluent few treated the economy as a series of political decisions, in which governments chose to put forward the interests of the wrong people –​landlords and bankers, rather than nurses and tenants. Corbyn spoke repeatedly of “the many, not the few”. In so doing, he left open the question of who constituted the bad few: Pretty soon, and especially after the 2008 crash, people will ask: who exactly are this few, working so hard to deny the rest of us our utopia? The antisemite has a ready answer.32 It is right that compared to other forms of left-​ wing theory (including 33 Marxism), Corbyn’s selection of economic targets was eclectic. The more haphazard it became, the greater the risk of it appealing to people whose other ideas belonged to the far right and attracting them to left-​wing politics.Yet structured into Freedland’s argument was an assumption. Given that none of his readers were likely to go off and read Capital, the only alternative to Corbynism was a return to the pre-​2005 Labour Party in which criticism of an economic system in which bankers could be paid millions of pounds a year in bonuses was strictly prohibited. By contrast, this book has argued that Corbyn’s populism was defensible, perhaps even necessary, but an insufficient reaction to its surroundings. Each time Corbyn raided in the direction of a populist audience, he made recruits to the Labour Party. The problem was that no one ever had any idea of what they should do, other than vote for Labour. They needed to be won to Labour values, and the only way that could happen was through constantly engaging with them in order to make populists into socialists. No one was thinking how to achieve that.

For Jews; for capitalism The pieces in the Guardian reflected a narrative on the Labour right. Siobhain McDonagh, a Blairite MP, told the Today programme that the Labour left was incapable of fighting antisemitism. “It’s very much part of their politics, of hard left politics”, she said, “to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as the financiers of capital. Ergo you are anti-​Jewish people”. John Humphrys asked her whether all-​capitalists were antisemitic? “Yes”, the Labour MP replied. “Not everybody, but there is a certain … there’s a certain strand of it”.34 In 2019, John McTernan, previously Tony Blair’s director of Political Operations, told the Financial Times that “Rhetoric about the 1 per cent and economic inequality has the same underlying theme [as antisemitic tropes] —​a small group of very rich people who cleverly manipulate others to defend their interests. So anti-​capitalism

152  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

masks and normalises antisemitism”.35 He was not saying that some anti-​capitalism has this problem, but all of it. In October 2020, Lisa Nandy MP told listeners of Radio 4 that “Antisemitism is a very particular form of racism. It’s the sort of racism that punches up, not down”.36 It is highly unlikely that Nandy thought she was saying anything original. This phrase that antisemitism only punches up has been used repeatedly by groups which had been critical of Corbyn’s Labour, including the Antisemitism Policy Trust.37 When Nandy herself had used the phrase before, at a meeting of the pro-​Israel JLM six months before, press accounts described this phrase in particular as “receiv[ing] loud applause”.38 But the phrase misunderstands the history of antisemitism. For, at the highpoint of anti-​Jewish prejudice, the 1930s and 1940s, anti-​Jewish racism did not merely look upwards, it also looked with hatred at those below. The poor were Jews; Communists were Jews; trade union leaders were Jews.39 Both perspectives were needed to justify the antisemites’ myths about themselves, that they were a movement above politics, beyond both left and right, just as capable of attacking Soviet Communists or Wall Street bankers and offering a patriotic and socialist alternative to each. In a pamphlet published by the Fabian Society in 2020,Wes Streeting MP, a supporter of the Labour right Wes Streeting, built on these arguments: Labour’s antisemitism crisis stems from a worldview that puts Jews or Zionists at the centre of a global capitalist conspiracy working to create a rigged system that works for the wealthiest few at the expense of the many. It was this worldview that voters found repulsive and that we must comprehensively abandon.40 This is a short and coded but intensely ideological passage. It ends with the 2019 election: Labour lost, because the worldview of its supporters was wrong. How, then, could Labour be saved? Streeting demanded the rejection not merely of the antisemitism of those supporters but also the anti-​capitalism of the former Corbyn leadership: the idea of “a rigged system that works for the wealthiest few at the expense of the many”. In the remainder of his pamphlet, Streeting made this preference explicit: There is a vacancy for a pro-​enterprise party in British politics … The Labour party is not an anti-​capitalist party … The public understand that we can’t demand Scandinavian public services on American taxes, but they do need convincing that Labour will be careful with their money.41 In this account, Corbynism become a cautionary tale, a warning not just against antisemitism, but against any form of anti-​capitalism or left populism. The only options left on the table are the politics that won majorities for European social democrats in the 1990s and have brought them an ever-​shrinking share of the vote since.

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  153

One further revealing exchange came in September 2018, when Corbyn released a short film noting the tenth anniversary of the world economic crash. This video was posted on his personal Twitter account with a message reading, “Ten years ago today the financial crash began. The people who caused it, now call me a threat. They’re right. Labour is a threat to a damaging and failed system rigged for the few”.42 The clip attached to Corbyn’s tweet showed images of the 2008 crisis, clips of Theresa May leaving Downing Street, pictures of a stock exchange and Canary Wharf, and images of those whose employment had been threatened by that crisis. There was nothing in it which could reasonably be construed as even codedly antisemitic. Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, replied, saying that beneath Corbyn’s politics there was a hidden antisemitic message: Been hesitating to tweet this because I keep thinking it can’t be, surely it can’t be. But the more I think about it, the more it seems it really is. This is “nudge, nudge, you know who I’m talking about don’t you?” And yes, I do. It’s appalling.43 Pollard was criticised for his tweet and accepted that he was wrong, but even his apparent concession managed to repeat the accusation that Corbyn was a racist, and could therefore be fairly criticised even for things he had not said or done: [T]‌his is what happens when antisemitism is allowed to flourish –​and when an antisemite leads a party. You start to read his every word through that prism. Even if the words aren’t about Jews.44 The politics of both Pollard’s original tweet and Streeting’s pamphlet work in a similar direction. They hold that it is simply impossible for any political figure of any standing to use terms such as “bankers” or “the few” without reverting to racist myth. They maintain, in effect, that it is in the interest of Jewish people to drive out of politics any significant strand of opinion that calls for meaningful social redistribution. Now, we live in a world where some people are grotesquely rich: where in one day in 2020 Jeff Bezos was able to add to his wealth $10 billion.45 To say, from the outset, that it is impermissible to comment on the wealth of Bezos (who is neither a financier nor a Jew) would suit Jeff Bezos admirably, and might be in the interest of other rich people or their admirers in the press. But it could not possibly be in the interests of the class of people who read Stephen Pollard’s Jewish Chronicle: for they are not the super-​r ich, nor even the mundanely rich. Rather the readers of that paper are a group of people that, like every other ethnic group in Britain, includes a large number of middle class as well as working class and vulnerable people. It probably is harder than Corbyn or his supporters realised to attack bankers without attracting unwanted interests of people for whom every banker is a

154  Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews

financier and is a Jew. But a party of socialists who cannot acknowledge the interests of the rich, or pose the interests of working-​class people against them, is a party which is doomed.

Notes 1 J. Harris, ‘The Unanswered Question:Why Do Antisemites Think Labour Is the Party for Them?’ Guardian, 4 March 2019. 2 Harris, ‘The Unanswered Question.’ 3 D. Finn, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s Opponents Burned the House Down to Stop Him —​Now Keir Starmer Is King of the Ashes,’ Jacobin, 25 June 2020. 4 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017 edn), pp. 53–​64. 5 Z. Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le Nationalisme Français (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972); Z. Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology,’ in W. Laqueur (ed), Fascism: A Readers’ Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 315–​378; Z. Sternhell, La Droite Revolutionnaire 1885–​1914, Les Origines Françaises du Fascisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978); Z. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Z. Sternhell, ‘The Anti-​Materialist Revision of Marxism as an Aspect of the Rise of Fascist Ideology,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 22/​3 (1987), pp. 379–​400. 6 L. Portis, Georges Sorel (London: Pluto, 1980). 7 The Mayor Commonalty and Citizens of London v Samede & Ors [2012] EWCA Civ 160, para 30–​31. 8 P. Mitchell, ‘Capitalism IS Crisis –​Fight for a Socialist Alternative,’ Socialist, 26 October 2011. 9 ‘Protest the Dominant Theme of 2011,’ KeithPP, 30 December 2011. 10 J. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 15–​21. 11 E. Rule, ‘The Infamous “Antisemitic” Mural,’ The Communists, 11 April 2018. 12 Rule, ‘The Infamous “Antisemitic” Mural.’ 13 A. Tangel, ‘Occupy Movement Turns 1 Year Old, Its Effect Still Hard to Define,’ Los Angeles Times, 15 September 2012. 14 The War on Art (Los Angeles: Mear One, 2018). 15 K. Connolly and M. Taylor, ‘Extinction Rebellion Founder’s Holocaust Remarks Spark Fury,’ Guardian, 20 November 2019. 16 E. Solomon, ‘Shared Beliefs Unite Factions in Germany’s Virus Protests,’ Financial Times, 5 September 2020. 17 M. Bolton and F. H. Pitts, Corbynism: A Critical Approach (Bingley: Emerald, 2018), pp. 208–​209. 18 M. Zarb-​Cousin, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn Managed to Bring Ukip Voters Back to Labour,’ Guardian, 13 June 2017; C. Curtis and M. Smith, ‘How Did 2015 Voters Cast Their Ballot at the 2017 General Election?’ YouGov, 22 June 2017. 19 N. Davidson, ‘The Neoliberal Era in Britain: Historical Developments and Current Perspectives,’ International Socialism, 5 July 2013. 20 D. Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London: Pluto, 2019), pp. 187–​206. 21 J. Meadway,‘What If “We’ve Reached Peak Globalisation”?’ Guardian, 28 September 2015. 22 J. Meadway, ‘Labour’s Economic Plans: What Went Wrong?’ Novara Media, 17 December 2019. 23 ‘Jeremy Corbyn Speech at Labour’s Campaign Launch,’ Labour, 9 May 2017.

Fighting the rich, without fighting Jews  155

24 ‘Jeremy Corbyn Speech.’ 25 ‘Jeremy Corbyn Speech.’ 26 L. Harpin, ‘Bombshell Tape Shows Jeremy Corbyn Ally Blamed “Jewish Trump Fanatics” for Inventing Labour Antisemitism,’ Jewish Chronicle, 30 July 2018. 27 Harpin, ‘Bombshell Tape.’ 28 Jones, This Land, p. 149. 29 Z. Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life (New York: Hachette, 2017), pp. 46–​50. 30 J. Freedland, ‘The Roots of Labour’s Antisemitism Lie Deep within the Populist Left,’ Guardian, 12 July 2019. 31 This is not to say that they have gone without any criticism at all. Supporters of the Women’s March in the United States for example have been attacked for failing to distance themselves from Louis Farrakhan or for supporting boycotts of Israel. K. Kahn-​ Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity (London: Repeater, 2019), p. 31. Meanwhile Podemos has been criticised for its anti-​Zionism, ‘Spain’s New Deputy PM Called Israel an “Illegal State”,’ Jewish News, 10 January 2020. For an assessment of the groups in the US which did intend to re-​run the Corbyn story, albeit with Bernie Sanders as their target, J. Stern-​Weiner, ‘We Need to Learn Lessons From Labour’s “Antisemitism Crisis”,’ Jacobin, 21 February 2020. 32 Freedland, ‘The Roots.’ 33 In his contrast between moralistic socialism (Corbyn) and socialism with a keener sense of economic interests (Marxism), Freedland was drawing on Bolton and Pitts, Corbynism. 34 ‘Siobhain McDonagh Links Anti-​Capitalism to Antisemitism in Labour,’ LabourList, 4 March 2019 35 J. McTernan, ‘Labour’s Mistake Is to Believe There Are No Enemies to the Left,’ Financial Times, 1 March 2019. 36 ‘Labour Investigating Nandy For Antisemitism,’ Left Insider, 12 November 2020. 37 ‘Antisemitism:What You Need to Know,’ Antisemitism Policy Trust, June 2020; J.-​P. Pagano, ‘How Antisemitism’s True Origin Makes It Invisible to the Left,’ Forward, 29 January 2018. 38 L. Harpin, ‘Sir Keir Starmer Tells Packed JLM Labour Leadership Hustings He “Would Not Describe” Himself as a Zionist,’ Jewish Chronicle, 14 February 2020. 39 Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, pp. 158–​160. 40 W. Streeting, Let Us Face the Future Again (London: Fabian Society, 2020), p. 45 41 Streeting, Let Us Face, pp. 10–​12. 42 @jeremycorbyn, Twitter, 15 September 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 43 @stephenpollard, Twitter, 15 September 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 44 @stephenpollard, Twitter, 15 September 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 45 R. Neale, ‘Jeff Bezos, The World’s Richest Man, Added £10bn to His Fortune in Just One Day,’ Guardian, 21 July 2020.

13 FROM THE EDGE OF THE ANTI-​WAR MOVEMENT

Previous chapters have sought to show that you cannot explain why, for example, Ken Livingstone’s remarks were likely to cause offence without knowing something of the history of 1930s Europe. The same applies to Jackie Walker’s invention of a role for Jews as the chief financiers of the slave trade. These are not the only cases which need to be seen in context. So too are the allegations against Chris Williamson MP. On 27 February 2019, Mr Williamson was suspended as a member of the party pending an internal investigation. The charge sheet against him was lengthy and of variable quality. At its heart were complaints that he had used his social media account to promote the standing of other people who had been accused of antisemitism. The pattern of behaviour has included allegations of campaigning in favour of members who have been formally disciplined by the Party for antisemitism; failing to delete retweeted material from a Holocaust denier, even after it was pointed out to you that the retweeted content belonged to an individual with such unacceptable views1 On 26 June 2019, Labour’s National Executive Committee concluded that Williamson had broken the party’s rules but that he should be readmitted with a formal warning.The panel’s decision was widely criticised and on 19 July 2019, the NEC referred Mr Williamson’s case for further disciplinary investigation.The effect of suspension was to remove Williamson from the list of Labour candidates for the pending general election. In the High Court, Williamson sought an injunction allowing him to stand. Mr Justice Pepperall to some extent agreed with Williamson. Labour had communicated to the MP on 26 June that its decision was a final one, and therefore proceedings should not have been reopened. In doing so, Labour had

From the edge of the anti-war movement  157

acted unlawfully.2 On the contrary Labour was entitled to investigate and indeed suspend Williamson if there were any new complaints against him. There had been and accordingly Williamson’s suspension was upheld.3 He stood for Derby North unsuccessfully in the 2019 general election as an independent (securing just 635 votes when the Conservative won with a majority of 2,540). Williamson was on a leftward trajectory.The Labour MP for Derby North since 2010, he had previously led Derby City Council, where his record included the introduction of Private Finance Initiative schemes which contributed to the privatisation of the city’s housing stock.4 In the 2010 leadership contest, he backed the soft-​left candidate Ed Miliband rather than Diane Abbott.5 He supported the war in Libya 2011 and airstrikes against Iraq in 2014,6 only to reinvent himself as a supporter of the left on Corbyn’s accession to the leadership. Out of Parliament between 2015 and 2017, he launched a “Democracy Roadshow”, touring constituencies with a message that Corbyn’s critics should be de-​selected.7 The life of constituency activist in the Labour Party can be bleak; it can feel as if your MP has as much interest in your opinions as the average feudal baron had in the thoughts of his serfs. Many members saw Williamson as a hero. Williamson’s increasing interest in foreign policy took him into a political space already occupied by existing left-​wing groups including the Stop the War Coalition (StWC). Although the leadership of StWC has from its launch in 2001 been held by socialists, from as long ago as 2003 and the American invasion of Iraq, the anti-​war movement in the UK was also infiltrated by currents of opinion which had more in common with the far right than they did with the left. In 2003–​05, there was a small minority current of opinion, albeit one which grew stronger as the occupation of Iraq went on, to say that 9/​11 had been an inside job. The growth of that strand of opinion was assisted by the need for anti-​war activists to find websites which would give an independent account of what was happening in Iraq. This meant disassociating from the main national newspapers and going to anti-​war news sites and relying on the news published there. In the United States, many of these sites were hosted by the “libertarian” right and saw no reason against promoting conspiracy theories, 9/​11 Truth accounts, and so on.8 Campaigns such as Stop the War did try to keep these opinions out, banning them from its platforms. But this was a matter of silent gatekeeping; the left did not like to admit we had any sort of problem in a movement we led. We would never admit openly that we were worried about X or Y Stop the War group in any given town. On two occasions the left in Stop the War came out fighting against the gathering right. One occurred in 2007 when the columnist George Monbiot devoted a Guardian article to criticisms of the 9/​11 Truth movement. The target of Monbiot’s attack was the film, Loose Change, a collection of interviews with some of the September 11 firemen and the flight instructor who had taught the 9/​11 pilot, Hani Hanjour. The makers of Loose Change claimed that their film had been watched by more than 100 million people. Denounced by several former admirers

158  From the edge of the anti-war movement

for having rejected their conspiracy theories and the films which encouraged them, in a follow-​up piece Monbiot found himself having to defend himself from their attacks. [I]‌t seems to me that the purpose of the “9/​11 Truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.9 The other instance took place the following year, when in his memoir If I Am Not for Myself, the New York–​born and now London-​based activist Mike Marqusee described how members of his family had been at first entranced and then appalled by the Zionist idea of a state for Jews only. In the course of his memoir, Marqusee acknowledged that in 9/​11 “it was not just America that had been attacked; it was New York, a great Jewish city, and it had been attacked by Muslims”. He recalled the criticisms that were made of the Stop the War Coalition for taking up the cause of Palestine and defended the Coalition for doing so. He described how activists had to struggle against demonstrators chanting on one occasion “Death to the Jews” in Arabic. Those words were spotted and challenged by other Arabic speakers. He explains why organisers objected to home-​made placards likening the Star of David to the swastika. The Star of David is a symbol of Jewishness, not merely of Israel ... [the image] compounds Jews and the state of Israel and then links both with an emblem of absolute reaction. It’s not a controlled and revealing analogy, just an emotive blast, and it can legitimize antisemitism.10 Marqusee supported the Coalition’s decision to call a protest in September 2003 six months into the occupation of Iraq. The date chosen happened to be Rosh Hashanah which, he argued, should not have been an issue. Other protests had been held on religious holiday days, at Easter and at Ramadan. He noted, however, that the organisers had responded clumsily to criticisms from the Board of Deputies. Steps were proposed by Coalition supporters to make Jews visibly welcome on the protest, but they were rejected by more senior colleagues. In particular, the Coalition rejected the idea of inviting an expressly Jewish anti-​war figure to speak from the platform. The excuses given by the event organisers, for example, “the Chief Rabbi is the only major faith leader not to oppose the Iraq War”, were irrelevant and in Marqusee’s term “crass”. They reflected the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the campaign and its dull “approach to ethnic diversity”.11 The leaders of the Stop the War Coalition did not thank Marqusee for encouraging them to think about how to link up Muslims and Jews but drove him and his allies out of the movement. Fifteen years later, it felt like socialist Jews were still fighting the same battle.

From the edge of the anti-war movement  159

Anti-​war politics were further shaped by the uprisings in the Arab world from 2011 and their defeat. In Syria, a popular uprising failed to topple the Assad regime and gave way to a civil war. Armies intervened, from across the region and beyond (including Russia, the United States, Britain) so that by the time Corbyn had become leader of the Labour Party there was a real and growing minority of left-​wing war anti-​war opinion which was both opposed to British intervention in the war and willing to pretend that there was some progressive content to the Assad regime and the states which backed it. That politics was also formally pro-​Palestinian, but in a way that would have been unrecognisable to previous generations of justice campaigners, such as the International Solidarity Movement which joined protests against Israel after 2003 in order to create the space for a popular uprising, or even the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaigners of the early 2010s. The new anti-​war politics was the product of 15 years of defeats; it saw the Arab people as a means to an end. It admired the Palestinians because they were despised by the Americans and could be integrated into its stories of great power rivalries. By 2015, websites promising an independent take on events in the Middle East had been in existence for ten years. They were, in some cases, much better read than conventional media. (There were also parts of state media which backed them, notably Russia Today12 and Press TV which found that such politics dovetailed with its own.) Like the “conventional” far right, this group of anti-​war antisemites grew through individual activists building up a social media infrastructure which at a certain point they monetised on YouTube, Patreon, and so on, enabling previously isolated individuals to become full-​time organisers on behalf of a political argument.13 A key figure in this milieu is Vanessa Beeley who was once a leading figure in Frome Stop War (a group unconnected to the national Stop the War coalition) and is now a social media personality with a Twitter following of more than 50,000 people.14 Beeley has argued on Twitter that “Zionists” control the Conservative Party’s foreign policy (“2 further US/​Zionist agenda”)15 the Syrian civil and medical defenders the White Helmets (“are #WhiteHelmets not ready to come out of the Zionist closet just yet?”),16 Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia (“#Zionist apologist”),17 Palestine Solidarity campaigners who support an uprising against the Assad regime (“Zionist agenda in #Syria”),18 and Emmanuel Macron in France (“a Zionist apologist”).19 Another person often cited in this anti-​American and anti-​left milieu is Gilad Atzmon, a jazz musician who tours the world promoting Henry Ford’s antisemitic manifesto The International Jew20 and hinting that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are genuine (“American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do try to control the world”),21 and saying Jews should be held accountable for Jesus’s death.22 Atzmon tells his followers that their enemy is not the right but the left (which is, he claims, “largely a Jewish intellectual domain”).23

160  From the edge of the anti-war movement

Another controversial figure is Scott Nelson, a Labour Party supporter with 75,000 followers on Twitter,24 who had denied that the Assad regime in Syria had used chemical weapons and predicted that Syria would be toppled by the West and its territory allocated to Israel.25 He also wrote that Tesco’s and M&S are “Jewish” businesses (“Jewish ancestors created those companies. The companies have Jewish blood”) and are at fault for “human rights abuses”.26 Between 2017 and 2019, Chris Williamson used his Twitter account to amplify the voice of each of these individuals. So, in April 2018, Williamson retweeted Scott Nelson. He was invited to withdraw his support, given Nelson’s history. At first Williamson insisted that Nelson had been misquoted, “I am sure he said no such thing”.Then, he insisted that Nelson had been accurately quoted but deserved a second chance, “He repeatedly apologised for those comments. He is opposed to all forms of racism and bigotry”.27 On 20 August 2018, Williamson attended a meeting addressed by Vanessa Beeley at the Beautiful Days festival. Afterwards, he congratulated her on talk and said that it had been a “privilege” to hear her speak.28 On 21 December 2018,Williamson tweeted support for an online petition complaining that Gilad Atzmon and his band had been prevented from playing at Islington’s Assembly Hall and demanding they perform: “Hands off Gilad Atzmon –​ Sign the Petition”.29 Later the same day, and after being criticised for his message, Williamson deleted the tweet. He then apologised.30 Williamson also had a long history of defending his party from accusations of antisemitism. In August 2017 (eight months before he retweeted Scott Nelson), Williamson told the Guardian, “I’m not saying it never ever happens, but it is a really dirty, lowdown trick, particularly the antisemitism smears”.31 The following month, in a piece for Tribune, Williamson referred to “malicious” and “positively sinister” accusations of antisemitism.32 In 2018–​19, by which time his own behaviour was also under the microscope, Williamson insisted on his innocence. But he sought to withdraw his previous claims that the complaints of antisemitism had mostly been false. He published a statement on Twitter which included the following passages: I have been an anti-​racist all my life. As a former member of the Anti-​Nazi League, I participated in direct action to confront foul antisemites in the streets. I reject racism ethically and morally. It has no place in the Labour Party or in our country. 33 Williamson acknowledged that Labour, as a left-​wing party, was expected to adhere to a higher standard than other political party when it came to anti-​racism. In similar terms to those previously used by Jeremy Corbyn he promised to be an ally in the fight against antisemitism: I am therefore sorry for how I chose to express myself on this issue within our party. This is a fight that I want to be an ally in.34

From the edge of the anti-war movement  161

He promised not to speak again on this subject without careful reflection: In future, I will take it upon myself to be more considered in my remarks and ensure they reflect the Labour Party’s unswerving and unfaltering commitment to anti-​racism and the fight against antisemitism.35 Yet since his expulsion from the Labour Party, Chris Williamson has maintained his conflict with those who he believes have wronged him. As he puts it, “A hostile foreign government has mobilised its assets in the UK –​which Israeli diplomats call their ‘power multiplier’ –​in an attempt to prevent a Corbyn-​led Labour government”.36 Once Williamson had been attacked, Corbyn supporters rallied to defend him. JVL published a piece “The Fury and the Fakery”, insisting that the criticisms of Williamson were “McCarthyite” and the MP no “Jew hater”.37 The Canary argued that “Williamson’s support for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, left-​wing Jewish Labour supporters, and Palestinian rights is unwavering”.38 The pro-​Palestinian news-​site, The Electronic Intifada, defended Williamson as “one of the most high-​profile victims of the witch hunt against the left and Palestine solidarity activists that has been raging in Labour in recent years”.39 The problem was that three times Williamson had used his own social media account to amplify the audience of people with a track record of antisemitism, assisting them in permeating the left and therefore reducing the space for other strands of opinion untainted by anti-​Jewish racism. In doing so, he made life harder for those pro-​Palestinian activists who have insisted that anti-​Zionism and antisemitism are rigorously separate. And he made life easier for supporters of Israel who insist that those two forms of politics are necessarily entwined.

Corbyn and the Palestinians This book has argued that the principal way in which supporters of the Labour left were vulnerable to antisemitic myth was when they invoked old ideas of Jewish conspiracy and control. Jewish people became the object of political fantasies accusing them of having collaborated with Hitler, or having financed the slave trade, or dominating global finance, and that all of this takes place with little direct reference to Israel or its policies. There were, however, some occasions when Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters were criticised for the positions he had taken on Israel. It was said that Corbyn himself had met with controversial figures who did not simply call for an end to the systematic oppression of the Palestinian, or even for the end to a state based on inequality, but for violent attacks on the Jewish population of Israel. To grasp how this could happen, we need to understand the role that Corbyn and the Labour left played in British politics prior to 2015. It is part of the life of an MP to answer requests from their constituents when the latter are faced with the potential loss

162  From the edge of the anti-war movement

of their jobs or homes or some other injustice at the hands of the state. All MPs sponsor personal causes, left-​wing MPs more than most.To a far greater extent than any other MP in Parliament Corbyn did both, offering himself as a sympathetic ear to any oppressed group. Since 2008 I have been a housing barrister in London, representing people all over that city and beyond who have lost their homes. A large number show their solicitor letters from MPs complaining of delays in disrepair, unlawful evictions, and the like. If I saw 50 such letters in seven years between 2008 and 2015, then perhaps five altogether were from MPs other than Corbyn, the remaining 45 (wherever in London the tenants lived) were from the MP for Islington North. Those who work in immigration law can tell a similar story of how Corbyn had repeatedly sent letters opposing the deportation of political activists and other migrants. Corbyn was the chair of the APPG on the Chagos Islands, chair of the APPG on Mexico, vice-​chair of the APPG on Latin America, and vice-​chair of the APPG on Human Rights, seemingly the only MP who took an interest in the rights of refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the patron of Anti-​Fascist Action in the 1980s and a supporter of Unite against Fascism a decade later, and of hundreds of other causes. His interests were disparate; all you needed to do (it seemed) to engage Corbyn’s sympathy was to be demonstrably the victim of an injustice. Indeed, as Geoffrey Alderman (a long-​standing contributor to the Jewish Chronicle) pointed out midway through Labour’s antisemitism crisis, one outsider group to which Corbyn had previously given active support was Britain’s Jews: In 2010, he put his name to an Early Day Motion –​tabled by Diane Abbott in the Commons –​calling on the UK government to facilitate the settlement of Yemeni Jews in Britain. He was supportive of Jewish efforts to facilitate the speedy issue of death certificates by the North London coroner. Alderman gave other examples of Corbyn’s support for communal initiatives: In June 2015, he took part in a ceremony in his Islington constituency to commemorate the original site of the North London Synagogue.40 Corbyn consistently supported campaigns for national liberation –​for South Africa, for Northern Ireland, and for Palestine. In May 1984, he chaired a conference of the “The Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine”. At that time, Corbyn’s personal politics appears to have been “one state” anti-​Zionist; in other words, he demanded the creation of a new state within the modern borders of Israel, one open equally to Jews and non-​Jews. As leader of the Labour Party after 2015, the majority of Corbyn’s statements supported a “two-​state” solution to the Israel-​Palestine conflict, the limitation of Palestinian rights to the creation of a second state alongside Israel, restricted presumably to East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the

From the edge of the anti-war movement  163

West Bank. As Jonathan Arkush, then president of the Board of Deputies, explained after talks with Corbyn in 2016: We had a positive and constructive meeting and were pleased that Mr. Corbyn gave a very solid commitment to the right of Israel to live within secure and recognized boundaries as part of a two-​state solution to the Israel-​Palestine conflict.41 While, previously, Jeremy Corbyn had argued that any nation state which existed only for the benefit of Jews and not for the whole population of Israel and Palestine would be unjust, now he was willing to accept that Labour’s position should be more moderate. That partial climbdown helps to explain the Board’s description of the meeting as “positive” and “constructive”. Corbyn’s support for Palestine led him to develop a wide circle of friendships, including with people that some of his later supporters would find intolerable, because they were too moderate.Veteran Israeli politician Uri Avnery was a founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement but by the 2000s his criticism of the Israel had become more muted, and he despaired at what he saw as the utopianism of those who demanded a one-​state secular society in Israel and Palestine.42 For that, he was criticised on the pages of the Electronic Intifada.43 Corbyn by contrast maintained his friendship with Avery, and publicly mourned his death.44 Yet, in at least some cases, Corbyn’s long advocacy of a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or his support for people faced with deportation, had caused him to work with people whose language had been grotesque. He faced a number of allegations of this sort, some of which were compelling, while others were not. It was said that Corbyn had attended meetings held by a group Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), when a member of that group Paul Eisen was a Holocaust denier. Corbyn was criticised for having written a letter in support of Stephen Sizer, a Surrey vicar, when Sizer faced disciplinary action within the church. Sizer shared links to an American site which had published Holocaust denial materials and stated that Israel was responsible for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Corbyn also faced questions about a wreath-​laying ceremony he attended in Tunisia in 2014. He said that he had visited the cemetery to honour innocent people killed in a 1985 Israeli air strike. But the event was held beside physical memorials for Palestinians who had participated in a terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympic Games.45 The accusation concerning Eisen missed out certain key details: first, that Corbyn had been a supporter of DYR since 2001, at which time Paul Eisen kept his Holocaust denial hidden. In 2005, Eisen publicly outed himself as a Holocaust denier. After that, leftists (including some of those who would later be prominent Jewish supporters of Corbyn) organised to isolate DYR, by insisting on the enforcement of rules excluding Holocaust deniers from membership of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.46 There had been significant kickback against anti-​Jewish racism within the pro-​Palestinian movement.This does not exculpate Corbyn from criticism (e.g.,

164  From the edge of the anti-war movement

he appears to have attended a DYR event in 2013,47 when most of his closest allies were boycotting that campaign). But it does suggest that the role of the left in combating antisemitism was greater than the press was capable of reporting. In the case of Stephen Sizer, Corbyn had supported him in April 2012 during a first investigation.48 At that stage, the complaints about Sizer were focussed not on what he had said or written but rather on the request that he stop sharing antisemitic material.49 The vicar said that he was willing to accept the criticisms and moderate his behaviour. In 2014, Sizer went further, attending a conference in Iran where he spoke in a session on the Israel lobby in England, while other speakers at the same event claimed there had been a Jewish conspiracy to cause the 9/​11 attacks. After further warnings50 and further broken promises, the Church ultimately ended his tenure. Corbyn’s supporters observed that his support for Sizer had been limited to the first stage of Sizer’s activity, and before the pattern of Sizer’s behaviour had become apparent. As for the Tunisian wreath, Corbyn was part of a delegation invited to pay respects to people killed in a 1985 Israeli bombing of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) headquarters in Tunis. Other British attendees of the event included both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. In the cemetery are memorials both to the Palestinian victims of the 1985 attacks and to the perpetrators of the massacre at Munch in 1972. The Daily Mail published photographs of Jeremy Corbyn in the vicinity of the graveyards for the perpetrators of the Munich attacks and argued that he must have secretly gone there to commemorate them,51 but a detailed report on the BBC website made it clear that the two graves were within feet of each other. (All signs to each are in Arabic only –​a language Jeremy Corbyn does not speak.)52 Corbyn’s defenders insisted that he had been “defamed”, and there was nothing in the story which contradicted his innocent explanation that he had attended a legitimate event to commemorate civilians killed in an atrocity, and that he had been unaware of who else was buried nearby.53

Raed Salah and the blood libel In the rest of this chapter, I want to focus on one further case, this time involving Raed Salah, a Palestinian cleric who had arrived in the UK in 2011 in order to carry out a short speaking tour and was let into the UK despite an exclusion order against him –​an order of which both he and the immigration officer who allowed him in were unaware.54 Salah was detained while protesters campaigned for his release –​and were ultimately successful. The Jewish Chronicle supported Salah’s detention and deportation. The paper reported that Salah had made speeches accusing European Jews of stealing Christian children and killing them.The blood libel, which accuses Jews of killing children in order to use their blood for ritual purposes, to show Jewish mockery of Christ, or to make unleavened Jewish bread,55 is one of the oldest of antisemitic myths. Most Jewish people would be shocked to learn that Salah had used this language, or that Corbyn supported had his right to speak in Britain.56

From the edge of the anti-war movement  165

Corbyn defended Salah as a pro-​Palestinian campaigner while largely ducking the question of what exactly Salah had said in the past. In 2011, Corbyn argued that the travel ban against Salah was motivated by “hysteria” and excessive: “It’s time that Western governments stood up to the Zionist lobby which seems to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism”.57 Reflecting on the incident five years later, Corby said that he and Salah “had quite a long conversation ... [a]‌t no stage did he utter any antisemitic remarks to me”.58 When Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party this incident was used to criticise him. Several Corbyn supporters insisted the allegations were false. An article on the website Jewish Voice for Labour maintained that “The Upper Immigration Tribunal rejected Theresa May’s attempt to deport Salah on the basis of a poem that had been doctored to make it appear antisemitic”.59 Although this was true, as far as it went, it dodged the most significant complaint against Salah, namely that he had promoted the blood libel. Vox Political insisted that the allegations “that Raed Salah was antisemitic” had been “shown during the hearings before the First and Upper Immigration Tribunals to be untrue”.60 Corbyn’s biographer Richard Seymour gave a similar account, writing of the blood libel accusations that “Salah won that court case precisely because these claims were shown to be false and based on mistranslations. The fact that Salah was being slandered by the government is the reason why Corbyn, quite ethically, stood by him”.61 It is correct that Salah won his appeal. The Upper Tribunal held that Theresa May had been misled as to the terms of a “poem written by the appellant, a matter on which there is now no room for dispute. As we have decided, she took irrelevant factors into account in relation to the indictments and the Hamas conviction”.62 When it came specifically to the allegation of blood libel, however, the Tribunal’s approach was different. Here, there was no dispute as to what Salah had said, nor any issue as to the quality of translation. Salah had given a long sermon in 2007: We have never allowed ourselves and, listen carefully, we have never allowed ourselves to knead the bread for the breaking [of] fasting during the blessed month of Ramadan with the blood of the children.63 Saleh went on to contrast the piety of Muslims with the nefarious action of Jews: And if someone wants a wider explanation, then he should ask what used to happen to some of the children of Europe, when their blood used to be mixed in the dough of the holy bread.64 The only issue for the Court was whether Salah’s words had been correctly understood. Salah insisted that they had not been. In his words: I have never invoked the blood libel and I would not do so. I could not say in respect of the Jews, or in respect of the followers of any religion, that they

166  From the edge of the anti-war movement

actually mix children’s blood with the bread. I know that this is not a Jewish tradition and that the allegation has been fabricated and used to persecute Jews.65 However, the Tribunal had concluded that Salah’s words did invoke the blood libel: We have taken into account that the same sermon contained more moderate language and concepts and positive references to Jewish prophets and synagogues. Nevertheless, we do not find this comment could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews.66 Corbyn’s supporters on the left might better have defended his actions by saying that when a state kills hundreds of civilians a year, quietly, in full knowledge of what it is doing and repeatedly, it is not a morally superior agent to the defeated men and women who rage against it in impotent fury, threatening attacks which the vast majority of them are powerless to carry through.67 They might have challenged a political discourse which casts a sharp light on the “extremists” on both sides,68 but seems incapable of acknowledging the sheer, unceasing, brutality of dispossession or the fundamental difference of power between a state and a dispossessed people. They might have explained Salah’s words in terms of the brutality of the occupation and its stifling effect on traditions which still clung on to a more expansive vision of Palestinian and human freedom. Instead they defended Corbyn by insisting that Salah had been vindicated of the accusation of blood libel when the courts had done nothing of the sort.

Notes 1 Williamson MP v Formby [2019] EWHC 2639, para 29. 2 Williamson v Formby, para 62. 3 The complaints are set out at Williamson v Formby, at para 63. They included, Sending an email to a member of the public who had complained to you about your criticisms of Margaret Hodge MP that referred her to a video on YouTube.The video described Ms Hodge as “cheapening and exploiting the memory of Jewish suffering”; “trivialising the memory of the Holocaust”; and requesting that she “get the hell out of the Labour Party”; among other offensive personal statements about her. 4 ‘Firebrand MP Chris Williamson Boasted about Role in Derby PFI Scheme,’ The Red Roar, 16 March 2018. 5 Jones, This Land, p. 253. 6 E. Casalicchio, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Ally Chris Williamson “Deeply Regrets” Past Votes for Military Action”,’ Politics Home, 26 April 2018. 7 ‘Labour MP Chris Williamson’s “Democracy Roadshow” Criticised,’ BBC News, 21 August 2018. 8 As the editors of one key site antiwar.com explain, “The founders of [the site] were active in the Libertarian Party during the 1970s; in 1983, we founded the Libertarian

From the edge of the anti-war movement  167

Republican Organizing Committee to work as a libertarian caucus within the GOP”, ‘About Us,’ antiwar.com. 9 G. Monbiot, ‘A 9/​11 Conspiracy Virus Is Sweeping the World, but It Has No Basis in Fact,’ Guardian, 6 February 2007; G. Monbiot, ‘9/​11 Fantasists Pose a Mortal Danger to Popular Oppositional Campaigns,’ Guardian, 20 February 2007. 10 M. Marqusee, If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-​Zionist Jew (London:Verso, 2008), pp. 259, 261. 11 Marqusee, If I Am Not for Myself, p. 264. 12 V. Beeley, ‘Covid-​19 Gives Cover for US-​Led Coalition to Keep Up Pressure on Syria,’ RT.com, 29 April 2020; V. Beeley, ‘White Helmets Use Covid-​19 Crisis to Further Us Coalition Regime Change Agenda in Syria,’ RT.com, 26 March 2020; V. Beeley, ‘Oscar Nominee “for Sama” Is a Propagandumentary That Pushes Al Qaeda’s Narrative in Aleppo,’ RT.com, 8 February 2020. 13 D. Renton, ‘The Far Right, the Left, and Antisemitism,’ All That Is Solid, 2 March 2019. 14 Accessed 29 July 2020. 15 @VanessaBeeley, Twitter, 14 January 2020. Accessed 26 August 2020. 16 @VanessaBeeley, Twitter, 24 July 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 17 @VanessaBeeley, Twitter, 10 August 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 18 @VanessaBeeley, Twitter, 2 June 2018. Accessed 26 August 2020. 19 @VanessaBeeley, Twitter, 22 January 2020. Accessed 26 August 2020. 20 D. Rich, ‘Is Gilad Atzmon a Fascist?” CST, 8 November 2017. 21 ‘Gilad Atzmon,’ Hurry Up Harry, February 2011. 22 D. Hirsh, ‘Openly Embracing Prejudice,’ Guardian, 30 November 2016. 23 Rich, ‘Is Gilad Atzmon’; A. Goldstein, ‘Gilad Atzmon and the Problem of Jerks in your Movement,’ Jewish Currents, 18 March 2012; K. Kahn-​Harris, Denial: The Unspeakable Truth (London: Notting Hill, 2018), p. 145. 24 As of 29 November 2020. 25 ‘Chris Williamson MP, Take More Care on Twitter,’ Anti Nazis United, 6 July 2017. For a fuller account of Nelson’s politics, including both apologies made by him, and further criticisms of him, ‘Scott Nelson,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 11 October 2017. 26 ‘Kremlin’s Useful Idiot Backs Notorious Antisemite,’ Guido Fawkes, 6 April 2018. 27 ‘Kremlin’s Useful Idiot.’ 28 ‘Labour’s Chris Williamson Praises Vanessa Beeley, Blogger,’ Huffington Post, 20 August 2018. 29 B. Welch, ‘Labour MP Chris Williamson Branded “Jew Baiter” for Signing Petition Supporting “Holocaust Denier” Gilad Atzmon,’ Jewish Chronicle, 21 December 2018. 30 F. Lockley, ‘Revealed: The Truth about Antisemitism Allegations against Expelled Labour MP Chris Williamson,’ Canary, 3 May 2020. 31 R. Mason, ‘MPs Should Have No Say over Who Leads Labour, Argues Shadow Minister,’ Guardian, 28 August 2017. 32 C. Williamson, ‘Agenda Setting,’ Tribune, 9 September 2017. 33 ‘Model Motions: Reinstate Chris Williamson MP!’ Labour against the Witch-​ Hunt, 28 February 2019. 34 ‘Model Motions.’ 35 ‘Model Motions.’ 36 ‘Chris Williamson: “A Hostile Foreign Government Has Mobilised Its Assets in UK”,’ Jewish News, 17 December 2019. 37 Media Lens, ‘Suspending Chris Williamson –​The Fury and the Fakery,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 5 July 2019.

168  From the edge of the anti-war movement

38 ‘Revealed: The Truth about Antisemitism Allegations against Expelled Labour MP Chris Williamson,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 3 May 2020. 39 A. Winstanley, ‘Chris Williamson Back as Labour MP,’ Electronic Intifada, 26 June 2019. 40 G. Alderman, ‘Horrors! Corbyn’s a “PM in Waiting” –​Accept It,’ Jewish Telegraph, 18 April 2019. 41 J. Cohen, ‘Corbyn Gives Commitments on Shechita and Two States but “Must Do More” to Address Links,’ Jewish News, 9 February 2016. 42 U. Avnery, ‘Bed of Sodom,’ Hagada Hasmalit, 22 April 2017. 43 I. Pappé, ‘Looking for Alternatives to Failure: An Answer to Uri Avnery,’ Electronic Intifada, 25 April 2017. 44 @jeremycorbyn, Twitter, 20 August 2018. Accessed 6 January 2021. 45 Other allegations included that Corbyn had in 2010 hosted an event at which a Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer had compared Israel to Nazism on Holocaust Memorial Day; that he had described Hamas as a force for “long-​term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region”; that he had appeared on Press TV in 2012 and claimed that the “hand of Israel” was behind an Islamist attack in Egypt; and that in a speech in 2013 he had accused some Zionists (presumably, as one of his critics the human rights barrister Adam Wagner, acknowledged, those who attend pro-​Palestinian events, ask difficult questions, and write blogs about them afterwards) of not understanding “English irony”. In doing so, he portrayed these Jews as un-​British even if (in Corbyn’s own words) they had “lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives”. ‘Jeremy Corbyn Apologises over 2010 Holocaust Event,’ BBC News, 1 August 2018; R. Booth, ‘Does the Tory Attack Ad Take Corbyn’s Remarks Out of Context?’ Guardian, 2 June 2017; J. Cohen, ‘Corbyn “Suspected Hand of Israel” in Egypt Bombing during Press TV Interview,’ Jewish News, 29 July 2018; H. Stewart and A. Sparrow, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: I Used the Term “Zionist” in Accurate Political Sense,’ Guardian, 24 August 2018; ‘Libel Case Begins over Corbyn’s “English Irony” Interview With Marr,’ Jewish Chronicle, 24 June 2020; A.Wagner, ‘The Context of the Latest Jeremy Corbyn Antisemitism Row Makes It Worse, Not Better,’ New Statesman, 24 August 2018. 46 T. Greenstein, ‘The Seamy Side of Solidarity,’ Guardian, 19 February 2007. 47 M. Dysch, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn Attended Event Hosted by Holocaust Denier’s Group in 2013,’ Jewish Chronicle, 18 August 2015. 48 ‘Jeremy Corbyn MP Challenges Accusations of Antisemitism,’ Stephen Sizer, 14 April 2012. 49 M. Shaviv, ‘UK Jews Complain to Church of England over “Antisemitic”Vicar,’ Times of Israel, 31 March 2018. 50 M. Dysch, ‘Stephen Sizer Warned after Attending Anti-​Israel Meeting,’ Jewish Chronicle, 2 November 2016. 51 E. Sinmaz, ‘Corbyn’s Wreath at Munich Terrorists’ Graves: Photos Show Labour Leader at Tribute Event for Palestine “Martyrs” ... Including Plotters Behind 1972 Slaughter of Israeli Olympic Athletes,’ Daily Mail, 10 August 2018. 52 ‘Jeremy Corbyn Wreath Row Explained,’ BBC News, 15 August 2018. 53 D. Samel, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Defamed –​Putting the Tunis Wreath-​Laying Accusations in Context,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 29 December 2019. 54 Mahajna (Salah) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 2481, para 2. 55 E. M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 56 D. Sugarman, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Blamed “Zionist Lobby” for Blood Libel Cleric Raed Salah’s Expulsion from the UK,’ Jewish Chronicle, 2 April 2019.

From the edge of the anti-war movement  169

57 M. Frot, ‘Corbyn Wrote “We Must Stand Up to Zionist Lobby” over Blood-​Libel Cleric’s Ban,’ Jewish News, 2 April 2019. 58 Sugarman,‘Jeremy Corbyn’; S. Oryszczuk,‘Corbyn’s “Honoured” Friend Jailed for Blood Libel,’ Jewish News, 9 May 2016. 59 D. Pavett, ‘The Curious Case of Jonathan Freedland,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 25 November 2019; also T. Greenstein, ‘Why Anyone Who Is Jewish and, on the Left, Should Have No Problem Voting for Jeremy Corbyn,’ Mondoweiss, 13 November 2019. 60 M. Sivier, ‘Evidence Mounts Up against the BBC’s Panorama Hatchet-​Job,’ Vox Political, 19 February 2019. 61 R. Seymour, Corbyn:The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (London:Verso, 2017 edn), p. 35. 62 Mahajna v Home Secretary [2012] UKUT B1, para 83. 63 Mahajna v Home Secretary, para 52. 64 Mahajna v Home Secretary, para 52. 65 Mahajna v Home Secretary, para 52. 66 Mahajna v Home Secretary, para 59. 67 As Khaled Hroub writes, of the radicalism of one such party, Hamas, “As a secular person myself, my aspiration is for Palestine and all other Arab countries for that matter, to be governed by human-​made laws. However, I see Hamas as a natural outcome of unnatural, brutal, occupational conditions”. K. Hroub, Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide (London: Pluto, 2006), p. ix. 68 R. Al-​Madhoun, The Lady in Tel Aviv (London: Telegram, 2013), p. 86.

14 ISRAEL’S EASTERN EUROPEAN ALLIES

As the antisemitism crisis wore on, various attempts were made by Corbyn’s left-​wing allies to change the conversation, and to bring back into focus what were, it was argued, equally clear instances of antisemitism by those who were now accusing Corbyn. On the website of the campaign, Jewish Voice for Labour, David Rosenberg reminded readers that in the European Parliament, the Conservatives were members of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group were in active alliance with groups such as the Polish Law and Justice Party, and the Latvian National Alliance, each of which had a lengthy history of antisemitism.1 Rosenberg explained that up until 2009 the Conservatives had been a member of the main centre-​right party in the European Parliament but had then split to form the rival ECR. At the end of 2017, Poland Law and Justice’s government had introduced anti-​ defamation laws making it a criminal offence carrying a jail sentence of up to three years to anyone who accused the Polish Nation of complicity in Germany’s war crimes.2 The laws criminalised any investigative study of moments in Polish history such as the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, when a crowd of right-​wing Poles killed 40 of the town’s Jewish inhabitants, then forced the remaining 300 into a barn and burned them alive. Jedwabne has been ever since a recurring source of debate in Polish public life, including in 2000–​01 after the publication of Jan Gross’s book Neighbours, which showed how the pogrom had been the work not of Nazis but of Poles.3 In 2016–​17, when media outside Poland reported the authoritarian nature of the new laws, and the effect they would have in preventing the study of the Holocaust; inside Poland, “patriots”, far-​r ight gangs with the patronage of the Law and Justice government, demonstrated outside the offices of President Andrzej Duda with a banner, “Take Off the Yarmulke –​Sign the Law”.4

Israel’s Eastern European allies  171

The introduction of these laws was of real concern to Jewish people, for they sought to police –​and distort –​the history of the Holocaust. Any pressure on the Polish government to reconsider them may have been to some extent lessened by that government’s alliance with the governing Conservative Party in Britain. To that extent, Rosenberg’s criticisms of that Party were correct. In reality, however, a much more important intervention in support of the Polish government came from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, after receiving assurances that the law would be amended and that enforcement of it would be left to the civil and not the criminal courts, signed a joint statement with his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki in June 2018. This stated, amongst other things, that the law had been necessary and was legitimate, with both countries agreeing that, “We reject the actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators of different nations”.5 This was not the first instance of Netanyahu trying to rewrite the history of the 1930s in order to validate right-​wing politics. Three years earlier, he had fantasised that Adolf Hitler was not an antisemite after all but had killed the Jews only because of foreign intervention: in this case an imagined request from Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-​Husseini.6 Whether anyone should have treated Netanyahu as a historical authority or not, securing the support of the Israeli government was of course a coup for Poland’s right-​wing government, and Netanyahu’s concession was criticised byYehuda Bauer, one of the world’s foremost Holocaust researchers, and a debate followed within Israel. Poland had, however, secured what it wanted: the most visible Jewish support possible for a law intended to limit the discussion of the real and documented participation of Polish citizens in the Holocaust.7 In 2018 and 2019, Israel was the patrons of a “Visegrád” group of Eastern European governments: Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, meeting their leaders, and seeking to lessen global criticism of them –​particularly over antisemitism. This has been of particular importance in Hungary.8 At the end of 2017, the governing Fidesz party began campaigning for fresh elections, with the message that there were millions of Muslim migrants willing to enter the country from Africa and that they would bring terror to Hungary. The party claimed that mass migration could be stopped only by a wall across the country’s southern border. In the words of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, “If the levee breaks, if they open the borders, if migrants enter the country, there is no way back”. This was accompanied by attacks on the “political empire” of George Soros, the octogenarian banker who had donated some $4 million to pro-​democracy NGOs in that country. If Orbán was re-​elected (which he was), Fidesz promised to introduce an anti-​Soros law, allowing the government to ban organisations which campaigned for the free movement of people. During the election, giant posters were put up all over the country insisting “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” Making explicit what the official campaign was happy to leave implied, thousands of these posters were then covered in graffiti denouncing Soros as a Jew.9

172  Israel’s Eastern European allies

There were plenty of people who saw the antisemitism of Orbán’s government and approved of it.They were, however, on the right and not the left of British politics. Once was the Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton who in an interview with the New Statesman defended Orbán, claiming that “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts”, and saying that Hungarians were right to be alarmed by what he termed, “the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East”.10 Scruton was rescued from the taint of antisemitism by the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard, who accused his critics of having “outrageous[ly] distort[ed]” Scruton’s words.11 In 2017, the European Commission initiated an “Article 7” procedure, first against Poland, and then (through the intervention of the European Parliament) against Hungary.12 This power allows disciplinary sanctions to be taken against members of the EU where they have failed to comply with the common values of the EU, including upholding the rule of law. In August 2020, Germany’s Europe Minister Michael Roth argued that one of the reasons why Article 7 had been needed was the willingness of the Fidesz government in Hungary to employ antisemitism against its opponents.13 Part of the Hungarian response to these criticisms was to insist on the closeness of its ties to Israel: Prime Minister Netanyahu had visited Hungary in 2017, the first Israeli leader to do so in three decades. He had termed Orbán a “true friend of Israel”. How then, Hungary’s defenders argued, could the Fidesz leader be an antisemite?14 We need to acknowledge the contrast between the way in which Israel operated in the imagination of well-​meaning liberal journalists in Britain and how it behaves in practice –​including, crucially, in relation to anti-​Jewish racism. The emerging far-​r ight politics of recent times has enjoyed the protection of a series of international sponsors. As of 2005, the most important of these was Russia. That country has used military and cultural power to advance its interests. It has spread propaganda by financing channels such as Russia Today, used cyber-​attacks and occasion assassinations to promote its interest, and has a presence on social media through numerous auxiliaries which it uses to boost the far right in every country: in Britain, for example, by assiduously boosting the social media presence of figures such as Tommy Robinson.15 Again, in 2017, Russia intervened in the French elections, by providing funds for Marine Le Pen’s candidacy, a gift which she was required to acknowledge by travelling to meet Putin just four weeks before the election.16 And that is before getting to the –​relatively modest –​support given by the Russian state to the Brexit side in the 2016 referendum, or its support for Trump’s election campaign. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump’s America played a similar role in relation to the global far right, with the president himself or members of his family retweeting the messages posted by even minor figures in the global far right, boosting their profile and winning for them an audience and access to funders which they would not otherwise have had.17 In May 2018, for example, Tommy Robinson was jailed after pleading guilty to contempt of court charges, after filming the proceedings of a trial in which Asian men were accused of sexual offences. He received the

Israel’s Eastern European allies  173

public support of Donald Trump’s family and government, with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr supporting him,18 and Sam Brownback, the US ambassador for International Religious Freedom lobbying the British ambassador in Washington, to demand Robinson’s release.19

Israel and its European allies Israel’s right-​ wing government also plays a part in working with antisemitic governments. Take, for example, its use of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. Among the right-​wing politicians to have been feted there include South Africa’s apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster, a delegation from Myanmar’s military junta which has been widely criticised for war crimes, Brazil’s far-​right President Jair Bolsonaro, and of course Viktor Orbán. We might usefully compare such visits to the part played by Lourdes in the imagination of a generation of European: those who knew that they were guilty of thefts and murders could pray to the Virgin Mary and atone for their sins.The difference with Yad Vashem is that Israel expects neither guilt nor contrition. Vorster visited in April 1976, two months before authorising the deaths of up to 700 people in Soweto. Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing visited Yad Vashem in September 2015, around a year before the start of the genocide against the Rohingya which ended in 700,000 people fleeing for their lives.20 One of the writers to have studied the relationship between Israel and the anti-​Jewish regimes was the scholar Zeev Sternhell, whose work on fascism has already been discussed. “It is a great mistake to think that Netanyahu’s courtship of the European far right is only a matter of realpolitik”, Sternhell argued in February 2019. Rather, the reason Netanyahu wanted to be seen as the patron of the Visegrád bloc was that these governments shared politics with his own: “hostility to the values of the Enlightenment, to human rights, to the concept of a nation as a community of citizens, to the principle of equality, and, generally speaking, to foreigners”.21 Sternhell rejected the politics of writers such as Hannah Arendt who had warned, even as early as 1944 and 1948, that key leaders of the emerging state were indifferent to Arab-​Jewish cooperation and would seek to expand Jewish territory through military conquest and terror.22 He did not accept that Israeli’s development or support for occupation had been inevitable. In contrast, Sternhell argued that Zionism had long possessed a dual aspect, a liberal element for Jews alongside an illiberal element for Palestinians. The latter, he argued, came to dominate over the former, changing Israeli society, “the more liberal and humanistic side expressed in the Declaration of Independence in 1948, was progressively swept aside by a half-​century of occupation and colonisation of the West Bank after the Six-​Day War of 1967”.23 The result was ever greater racial segregation within Israel’s borders: [T]‌ he Nationality Law passed last year by Israel’s Knesset stated it precisely: Israel is a Jewish state, and the Jewish national community takes

174  Israel’s Eastern European allies

precedence over the community of citizens and is morally, judicially, and politically superior to it.24 The effect on Israeli Palestinians had been to render them second-​class citizens. And they were the privileged minority of Arabs compared to the inhabitants of Gaza or the West Bank: This is nothing compared to the situation in the occupied territories, where a form of apartheid is rampant, and an occupation permits the theft of Palestinian land.25 That domestic turn rightwards, Zeev Sternhell maintained, was the ultimate reason for the relationship between Israeli and the illiberal government of Poland and Hungary. In normal conditions, these states [the Visegrád bloc] would not be part of the European Union. These societies not only lack a democratic tradition; many of their leaders and citizens also lack a desire to adopt the values of the Enlightenment.26 When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu saw such states, Sternhell argued, he was looking at a reactionary politics which mirrored his own. “Not only does Israel collaborate willingly with this Trojan horse, which aims at destroying the fabric of the liberal values of the West, but it also sees itself as an integral part of this anti-​ liberal bloc”.27 Another British writer who has engaged with the phenomenon of declining Jewish support for Israel is Baroness Neuberger, the full-​time senior rabbi to the West London synagogue, who sits in the House of Lords as a Crossbencher, after seven years in which she took the Liberal Democrat whip. Neuberger is a pillar of centre-​ground Jewish opinion. But in her 2019 book Antisemitism, she makes a serious attempt to explain why an increasing number of Jews in Britain and elsewhere no longer consider themselves Zionists. She diagnosed a shift to the right which had led to greater criticism of Israel by her friends, let alone her enemies: Israel has matured and has become not the socialist dream it once was meant to be ... [It has] a West Bank occupation that seems never ending and deeply troubled, increasing violence and anger in Gaza, and a government that is increasingly nationalistic and allergic to criticism.28 Undoubtedly, Israel has changed. The country’s politics are different: with the left in every government until 1977, and the right almost as consistently afterwards. Forms of ultra-​orthodox and messianic Jewish belief flourish there to a far greater extent than in the Jewish diaspora. They do so because they reflect the reality of Israeli existence. For secular Israeli, and for most British Jews, Israel’s

Israel’s Eastern European allies  175

right to exist is justified in essentially democratic terms. The Jews of Israel form a majority (provided that East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories are excluded); as a majority they are entitled to decide how they and how everyone else in their territory live. The problem with that perspective, from the point of view of the Israeli right, is that it is insecure, both morally and demographically. For, as recently as 75 years ago, Jews were not the majority in Palestine. Rather that majority had to be created, by the events of 1948 and 1967. Even today, if the population of the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem is added to the population of Israel (and all Palestinian refugees excluded), the Muslim proportion of Israel and Palestine is already closing on 50 percent. In his book To the End of the Land, the novelist David Grossman captures the insecurity of Israelis in the relationship between a Jerusalemite woman in her early fifties, Ora, and her Arab taxi driver Sami. The latter seeks to share with Ora a few of the recurring experience of Arab life. There were times, Grossman writes, When it occurred to her that she was learning from him what she would need to know, one day, if –​or when –​the situation in Israel was reversed, God forbid, and she found herself in his position and he in hers. That future, unwanted by Jewish Israelis, Grossman insists, was nonetheless “possible after all. It was always lurking behind the door”.29 Sheer demographic pressure obliges the country to be ever harsher in its treatment of the Palestinians, to build an ever-​ increasing number of red-​ roof 30 settlements on the West Bank, to cheer on the settlers as they uproot olive trees, smash windscreens, and burn mosques,31 or for Members of the Knesset to articulate fantasies about the biblical gift of the Land of Canaan to the Jews, or the founding of a Third Temple in Jerusalem.32 The radicalisation of Israeli Jews is seen by Jewish groups outside Israel. Year by year, the gap between Israeli and exile Jewish experience grows, and ever-​g reater efforts have to be exerted to pretend that there is a single, shared, Jewish experience and a shared approach to the future of the region. Watching this process is akin to knowing that beneath the ground, two tectonic plates are tearing apart and reshaping everything else as they do. The pressures are frustratingly slow, but they are real.

Israel and the global far right If we look beneath the Israel government to other pro-​Israel advocacy bodies, it is noticeable that some of these have been a conduit towards the British far right, funding anti-​Islamic activists with whom they share a common politics of supporting Israel. So, the pro-​Israel campaigner and philanthropist Robert Shillman sits on the board of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. In 2017, Shillman funded a series of “Shillman Fellowships” at the far-​r ight media channel, Rebel Media. Among the beneficiaries of his generosity was Tommy Robinson who was paid a stipend of £100,000 per year.33 The

176  Israel’s Eastern European allies

highest profile funder of this sort is the Middle East Forum (MEF), which in the United States sustains the Campus Watch website to spy on anti-​Zionist activity by Palestinians and leftists.34 In the UK, when anti-​Islamic activist Tommy Robinson was jailed for contempt of court, the MEF donated £47,000 to the cost of his legal fees.35 Thus in both 2017 and 2018, the highest-​recorded donors to any part of the British far right were both US-​based pro-​Israel activists. A similar story can be traced about the myth of George Soros, the individual who incarnates better than anyone else today’s antisemitic fantasies of Jewish control.That myth originated within Israel itself. In 2012, the right-​wing website Latma produced a music video “Jews united against Israel” mocking left-​wing Jews who did not support the occupation. Its main targets were President of the New Israel Fund Naomi Chazan36 and George Soros. “When Soros handed out cash by the truck”, the video begins, “to funds, associations, to every schmuck”, before building to the words, “We [Soros and his allies] hate Israel every one of us”.37 A year later Israeli American political consultant George Birnbaum, who had served for 18 months as Netanyahu’s chief of staff, was commissioned by Viktor Orbán to draw up a strategy for Fidesz in that country’s election. In Birnbaum’s words, “There was no real political enemy … there was no one to have a fight with”. From there came the idea of a puppet master, who could be accused (despite his age and long absence from Hungary) of manifesting a secret control over all the forces in Hungarian society who were matched against Orbán.38 Soon Soros was accused of supporting non-​ governmental organisation, and environmental campaigners, and campaigning for Hungary to be flooded with refugees. He was said to control the mafia. The Soros myth was then amplified again from within Israel, in 2017, when Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair published a cartoon showing Soros as the puppet master controlling first shape-​shifting lizards, then Illuminati, and then finally a triad of anti-​corruption activists, journalists, and left-​wing politicians.39 In July 2019, when Israel’s ambassador to Hungary made the mistake of siding with that country’s Jewish organisations in criticising Orbán’s anti-​Soros campaign as antisemitic, Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly criticised his own ambassador. The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Soros “continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected government” by funding organisations “that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself ”. In September 2019, Netanyahu senior raised the stakes even higher, accusing Soros of conspiring with Israel’s nuclear rival Iran.40 Since 2016, the image of Soros as an all-​powerful malevolent force has spread from Israel and Hungary across the world and become a recurring antisemitic myth. According to journalist Hannes Grassegger, who has done more than anyone to document its spread, In 2017, Italians started talking about Soros-​ financed immigrant boats arriving on the shores. In the US, some people suspected Soros was behind

Israel’s Eastern European allies  177

the migrant caravan entering from Central America. A Polish member of parliament called Soros the “most dangerous man in the world”.41 We can add the use of the myth by the likes of Trump and Putin,42 and the dark allusions to Soros’s power made by the Hart and Rees-​Mogg, cited in the introduction to this book. The myth of Soros’s secret power is simultaneously the most important single weapon in the global arsenal of contemporary antisemitism and a product of Israel’s right-​wing political culture, in which insults are ubiquitous and the left routinely denounced as traitors.

Vocal about antisemitism, silent about Israel In 2015–​19, left-​wing supporters of Corbyn were unwilling to admit what was happening when socialists were heading in a certain direction. They have been roundly criticised for their silence. When the right-​wing government in Israel maintains its occupation of Palestine, when it gives active political assistance to antisemitic regimes in Eastern Europe, and when it propagates antisemitic myths about its Jewish critics, similar dynamics of self-​censorship could be seen on the Labour right and in Jewish circles. It is not that people were unaware of the problem. It is rather that there was an overwhelming fear of joining in with attacks on Israel. Admittedly, there were a few occasions when modest acts of dissent could be heard. In 2018, for example, the Board of Deputies issued a public statement criticising Israel’s new Nationality Law and its meaning for that state. The statement read: Whilst we celebrate Israel’s Jewishness, there is concern that some of the measures in this law are regressive steps. Among Israel’s great strengths are its democracy and diversity. Being Jewish is a wonderful thing, but this should not lead to doing down others.43 The Board did criticise the Nationality Law: All people should be valued, and Israel’s Arab and other minority populations should be a treasured part of society. The lesson of Jewish history is that societies are stronger when minorities are affirmed, and they decay when minorities are degraded. We will be writing to Israel’s Ambassador to express concerns at these measures.44 If you look among Corbyn’s critics, you can find criticisms of the antisemitism of Viktor Orbán.45 Albeit these were rare and muted.46 Almost never would any of the public figures who have criticised Corbyn acknowledge the support Orbán has been given by Netanyahu’s government, or the part Israel has played in shielding him from criticism.

178  Israel’s Eastern European allies

The theme of the anti-​Corbyn campaign was that criticisms of Israel were in danger of becoming improper, unjust, and racist. But antisemites were not just marching; in large parts of Europe, they were in government. And the politics of the campaign against Labour’s antisemitism made it harder to challenge these governments and the allies who protected them.

Notes 1 D. Rosenberg, ‘Time for Jewish Leaders to Ask the Tories Some Difficult Questions,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 30 March 2018. 2 Act of 26 January 2018 Amending the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance; D. Tilles and J. Richardson, ‘Poland and the Holocaust,’ History Today, 24 April 2018. 3 A. Michnik and A. Marczyk, Against Antisemitism: An Anthology of Twentieth-​Century Polish Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. xxxvi–​xxxxvii, 345–​346; P. Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-​ Bolshevism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 196–​197. 4 Jan Grabowski, Murder in German-​Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 280–​281; J. Gunter, ‘Holocaust Law Wields a “Blunt Instrument” against Poland’s Past,’ BBC News, 3 February 2018; R. Mackey, ‘Polish Law on Holocaust Draws New Attention to Antisemitism in Poland’s Past and Present,’ The Intercept, 3 March 2018. 5 ‘Poland-​Israel PMs’ Joint Declaration: Text,’ Poland-​in, 27 June 2018. 6 O. Aderet, ‘Yad Vashem’s Chief Historian on Hitler and the Mufti: Netanyahu Had It All Wrong,’ Haaretz, 22 October 2015. 7 N. Landau, and O. Aderet, ‘Netanyahu on Softening of Polish Holocaust Law: We Fulfilled Our Duty to Safeguard Historical Truth,’ Haaretz, 27 June 2018; O. Aderet, ‘With Holocaust Declaration, Netanyahu and Polish PM Use History for Political Needs,’ Haaretz, 5 July 2018. 8 ‘Hungary Passes a Law to Shut Down a Bothersome University,’ Economist, 8 April 2017; P.Wilkin, Hungary’s Crisis of Democracy:The Road to Serfdom (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 49–​82; L. Marsili and N. Milanese, Citizens of Nowhere: How Europe Can Be Save from Itself (London: Zed, 2018), pp. 67–​69. 9 S. Walker, ‘Hungary’s Viktor Orbán Secures Another Term with Resounding Win,’ Guardian, 8 April 2018; ‘Viktor Orbán: Our Duty Is to Protect Hungary’s Christian Culture,’ Guardian, 7 May 2018; Z. Kovács, ‘A Stronger, More Rigorous Stop Soros Bill Is Now in Front of the Parliament: Here’s a Look at the Details,’ About Hungary, 31 May 2018; S. Walker, ‘No Entry: Hungary’s Crackdown on Helping Refugees,’ Guardian, 4 June 2018; ADL, Quantifying Hate: A Year of Antisemitism on Twitter (New York: Anti-​ Defamation League, 2018); J. Atkinson, ‘I Will Continue to Fight against the EU, to Deliver Brexit and Make a Lot of Noise in the Chamber,’ Voice of Europe, 15 June 2018. 10 G. Eaton, ‘Cameron’s Resignation Was the Death Knell of the Conservative Party,’ New Statesman, 10 April 2019. 11 A. Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p. 141. 12 M. Michelot, ‘The “Article 7” Proceedings against Poland and Hungary: What Concrete Effects?’ Institut Jacques Delors, 6 May 2019. 13 E. Inotai and C. Ciobanu, ‘Antisemitism Creeps Back as Hungary and Poland Fail to Draw Red Lines,’ Reporting Democracy, 11 September 2020. 14 I. Ben Zion, ‘Netanyahu Greets Hungary’s Orbán as “True Friend of Israel”,’ Associated Press, 19 July 2018.

Israel’s Eastern European allies  179

15 M. H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 137–​153; O. J. Reuter, The Origins of Dominant Parties: Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post-​Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 16 L. Pasha-​Robinson, ‘Marine Le Pen Meets with Vladimir Putin on Visit to Moscow,’ Independent, 24 March 2017. 17 L. Dearden, ‘Donald Trump Retweets Britain First Deputy Leader’s Islamophobic Posts,’ 29 November 2017. 18 P. Hermansson, ‘Understanding the International #FreeTommyRobinson Campaign,’ Hope Not Hate, 17 June 2018. 19 D. Smith,‘Trump Diplomat Lobbied UK over Tommy Robinson,’ Guardian, 14 July 2018. 20 ‘Israel’s Dirty Arms Deals with Myanmar,’ Haaretz, 28 August 2018; G. Frankel, ‘The Skeleton in Israel’s Closet,’ Foreign Policy, 25 May 2010; O. Noy, ‘For the Jewish State, the Holocaust Is a Tool to Be Manipulated,’ 972 magazine, 20 November 2020. 21 Z. Sternhell, ‘Why Benjamin Netanyahu Loves the European Far-​Right,’ Foreign Policy, 24 February 2019. 22 H. Arendt, ‘Zionism Reconsidered,’ The Menorah Review 33 (1945), pp. 169–​175; “Letters to the Times, New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed”, New York Times, 2 December 1948. 23 Sternhell, ‘Why Benjamin Netanyahu.’ 24 Sternhell, ‘Why Benjamin Netanyahu.’ 25 Sternhell, ‘Why Benjamin Netanyahu.’ 26 Sternhell, ‘Why Benjamin Netanyahu.’ 27 Sternhell, ‘Why Benjamin Netanyahu.’ 28 J. Neuberger, Antisemitism.What It Is.What It Isn’t.Why It Matters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), p. 53. 29 D. Grossman, To the End of the Land (London:Vintage, 2010), p. 55. 30 E. Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London:Verso, 2017), p. 127. 31 N. Baram, A Land without Borders: My Journey around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Melbourne: Text, 2015), p. 15. 32 Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 79. 33 A. Gilligan,‘Tommy Robinson Winds Up Bigots and the Cash Floods in,’ Times, 5 August 2018; L. Dearden, ‘Darren Osborne: How Finsbury Park Terror Attacker Became “Obsessed” with Muslims in Less Than a Month,’ Independent, 1 February 2018; ‘Former EDL Leader Tommy Robinson Suspended from Twitter,’ ITV News, 28 March 2018; J. Ling, ‘Inside Rebel Media’s Big-​Money Anti-​Islam Crusade,’ Vice, 22 August 2017; A. Kotch, ‘Trump Megadonors and Business Execs Are Bankrolling QAnon-​Friendly Candidates,’ Truthout, 3 October 2020. 34 For one victim’s account of being monitored by Campus Watch, H. Dabashi, On Edward Said: Remembrance of Things Past (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), pp. 33–​39. 35 J. Holliday and L. Beckett, ‘Revealed: The Hidden Global Network behind Tommy Robinson,’ Guardian, 7 December 2018. 36 Elsewhere on the right, Chazan has been depicted in right-​wing literature with an exaggerated nose and a horn coming out of her head. L. Lenkinski, ‘How Trump and Netanyahu Made American Antisemitism Come Alive,’ 972 Magazine, 18 November 2020; N. Sheizaf, ‘Jerusalem Court: Okay to Call Im Tirtzu a “Fascist Group”,’ 972 Magazine, 8 September 2013. 37 N. Jeffay, ‘Israeli Group Mocks Soros and Thomas Friedman,’ Schmooze, 21 May 2012. 38 H. Grassegger, ‘The Unbelievable Story of the Plot against George Soros,’ BuzzFeed, 20 January 2019.

180  Israel’s Eastern European allies

39 H. Mattar, ‘Netanyahu’s Son Just Published an Antisemitic Cartoon on Facebook,’ 972 Magazine, 9 September 2017. 40 N. Epstein, ‘The Vilification of George Soros in Israel,’ Moment, winter 2019. 41 Grassegger, ‘The Unbelievable Story.’ 42 Grassegger, ‘The Unbelievable Story.’ 43 Board of Deputies of British Jews,‘Board of Deputies Reacts to Israel’s Nation State Law,’ 19 July 2018. 44 ‘Board of Deputies Reacts.’ 45 J. Freedland, ‘Under Cover of Coronavirus, the World’s Bad Guys Are Wreaking Havoc,’ Guardian, 15 May 2020. 46 Neuberger, Antisemitism, p. 103.

15 ON GATEKEEPING

One of the reasons why global politics has swung so hard to the right since 2016 is the differential way in which the centre-​left and centre-​r ight dealt with the rise of charismatic figures threatening the previous political compromise which had lasted between about 1979 and 2015 (“neoliberalism”). In Britain (Brexit) or in the United States (Trump) an old-​style conservative establishment sought to limit the rise of a more nationalist right wing, only to find itself overwhelmed by it. Trump had a greater presence on social media, richer friends, and belonged to the moment, while his opponents represented the past. In place of the idea that budgets needed to be cut forever, he said welfare spending could go up. He promised that blue collar jobs would be just as well-​protected as they ever had been in the past. His mechanism to protect them was to prioritise the interests of certain groups, defined in racial terms: whites against blacks and Muslims, white racists (the sorts of people who demonstrated the following year at Charlottesville) against what he called their “antifa” (anti-​fascist) opponents. While the centre-​r ight succumbed to its outliers, the centre-​left –​in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, proved more determined at blocking its opponents in its own camp. Hillary Clinton succeeded in persuading many liberal writers that there was ranged against her a coalition of sexist men (“Bernie Bros”). Clinton was able to draw on supportive think-​tanks and international campaigns, the legacies of her husband’s two successful contests for the Presidency as well as her own previous attempt in 2008. She also enjoyed the support of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)F, the Democrats’ leadership between elections, which would have supported her even if it were not for the DNC’s financial dependency on funds granted to it by her campaign. The rules of her party provided for 400 unelected “super-​delegates”, senior Democrats who agreed to vote for Clinton irrespective of Sanders’ support in their own states and whose intention to vote for

182  On gatekeeping

her was leaked to the press, seemingly to demoralise Sanders’ supporters and force him to concede.1 “Incredible thought it may seem”, one commentator observed, the political system of the United States is “better girded against a soft left than a hard right”.2 With very few exceptions (one of which was briefly Britain), the period from 2016 to 2019 repeatedly saw old-​style centre-​left candidates standing against a new populist right but losing time and time again. The subject of this book is the left in crisis –​but what Corbyn also represented, at his best, was an attempt to catch up with the breakthroughs made by the right and to defeat the populist right on the terrain of redistributive economics. For several years, I argued that what the left needed was to open itself up to its outliers, in the way that the right had. My other model was something like the Syriza government in Greece which in the first heroic period (i.e., between January and July 2015) opened its ranks to socialists outside Syriza, offering such independents as Yanis Varoufakis roles in government, and briefly resisted pressure from the European Commission and the European Central Bank to impose austerity.3 What the success of Syriza in 2015, and of Corbyn in 2017, appeared to show was the viability of a strategy which drew on the goodwill towards social democracy of forces further to its left. To some extent Corbyn in opposition did this: the parts of Labour’s manifesto that addressed how to protect workers or tenants, for example, were substantially written by people involved in social movements and with detailed knowledge of those sectors. They were more imaginative and more concrete for their involvement. But one lesson of the antisemitism scandal was that the left can open up its party to outsiders only if those involved in the far left of politics are more assertive about protecting our margins than we were between 2015 and 2019. In Sky journalist Lewis Goodall’s book Left for Dead? which was published after the 2017 election, Goodall interviewed a number of disgruntled Labour MPs who –​at that stage –​preferred to remain anonymous. One told him that Institutionally, the people around Corbyn believe there’s no limit to their left, somebody has joined because of this exciting call to get a socialist economy, you can almost justify anything their name, and therefore it must just be the right of the Labour Party having a go at them. They don’t police the borders of the left.4 None of these metaphors –​policemen, border guards –​is heartening to socialists who want to see Britain become a more forgiving and less carceral society. We do not want to see more cops, not even metaphorical ones in our heads; we would rather there were teachers who could listen to the people who were getting the politics wrong and explain to them and change their behaviour. But during Labour’s crisis, both teachers and border guards were in short supply. Corbyn’s tragedy was that when he turned to “the movements”, he was looking to a left which was shaped by 30 years of defeats, an anti-​war milieu which was

On gatekeeping  183

nostalgic for the politics of the 1980s, a trade union leadership whose tolerance of dissenters was limited, and a far left, key parts of which had been badly compromised by their indifference to sexism.5 In the words of the left-​wing political economist Joe Guinan, “The Corbyn project was always a long shot, a short cut”, which if it had succeeded would have been “a victory over and against our own political understandings and strategies”, the product of a left which was required to improvise a radical programme without having undergone the work of “hard organising and base-​building” which normally precedes any such breakthrough.6 In this context, Corbynism was a deliberate opening up of a party to social forces that were not previously organised and had no representation at Westminster. At times, you could see the left being renewing itself, in the Corbyn for leadership campaign, in the formation of Momentum, or in the enthusiasm of the people who became involved in socialist politics for the first time.You could feel it in exchanges between Corbyn and grime artists including JME, Stormzy, and AJ Tracey,7 in the energy with which so many young people campaigned for Corbyn in the 2017 and 2019 elections, and in the breadth and excitement of The World Transformed events. The left was larger, more ambitious, and better for having gone through these experiences. If you wanted to tell the story of the Labour left in 2015–​19 as a tragedy, you could.You might say that for the first time in the party’s history8 Labour was willing to express scepticism about the institutions of the British state –​its monarchy, its private schools, and the foreign policy consensus which stretches from the office of the prime minister to the generals and from there to the arms manufacturers. This made Labour exciting to a generation of young voters who identified passionately with the Corbyn project and would never have felt the same excitement about a party led by David Miliband or Keir Starmer. From this perspective, the moment when Corbynism came of age was not in the vote at the end of the 2017 election but the campaign which preceded it, and in the particular televised debates with some TV audience pressing him to say that he would use the country’s nuclear weapons, and Corbyn refusing to do so. On this account, the horror of Corbynism was that what made it seem most exciting was also what reduced its moral sheen. For by setting itself against the post-​ 9/​11 foreign policy consensus which still holds that Britain is always potentially at war with Islam and that all “Muslim” causes are illegitimate, Labour allowed itself to be dragged behind the worst parts of the anti-​war coalition, the ones which took the least care to distinguish between the activities of Israel as a state and the Jewish people who live within the borders of that state. Yet, one theme of this book was that unlike a Greek tragedy this collapse was not inevitable, that it is possible to demand the absolute equality of Jews and non-​Jews in the Middle East,9 without falling into the trap of blaming Israeli actions on the Jewish character of its people. For that break to occur, however, you need to have a generation of radicals, people with roots in the left and capable of protesting against antisemitism as the left did prior to 2016.

184  On gatekeeping

James Butler, one of the editors of Novara Media, alludes to a recurring divide within Corbynism. He asks: Was the goal ... to wind the clock back ... by returning the trade unions to a central position in Labour and chasing a romanticised version of the post-​ war settlement? Or was it to bring the post-​2008, post-​austerity generation which had been so enthused by Corbyn into formal, institutional politics?10 To write of these two projects is to identify the axis across which left Labour reactions towards the antisemitism crisis cleaved. The new groups of Corbyn supporters were healthier than the old Left when it came to understanding the risk of lapsing into antisemitism. For example, Momentum, to a far greater extent than other Labour institutions, sought to counter-​attack antisemitism. The group organised joint protests with the JLM against David Icke. It also produced five political education videos about different forms of antisemitic conspiracy theories and involved a range of groups and people in this work including JLM and Hope not Hate which had been critical of Corbyn. One of the films, focussing on the Rothschilds and presented by Michael Walker of Novara Media, attracted an impressive two million views.11 While Momentum was trying to take the initiative, it was undermined by other parts of the Corbyn coalition. In particular, the Corbynite websites –​the likes of The Canary or Skwawkbox –​tried to simplify politics. As early as spring 2017, for example, far-​left journalists with no love for the mainstream had shown how the Canary worked on a business model of payment-​by-​clicks, which tended to produce shallow sides-​based pieces and the blinkered defences of trusted people that we have encountered so often in this book.12 For such sites, argues Jon Lansman, There is no grey zone between us and our enemies, no openness not only for compromise or tactical retreat but also for adjustments to presentation or framing of our case in order to win over waverers or disarm opponents. You’re either with them or you are the enemy.13 I have described in a previous chapter how articles repeatedly appeared on Skwawkbox supporting Karie Murphy, the former UNITE official who was now the executive director of the Labour Party’s Leader’s Office.14 This was not the only occasion when the union was associated with that website. In 2017, when Len McCluskey stood to extend his term as the general secretary of the union, Skwawkbox published a news story to the effect that right-​wing Labour MPs were joining the union as members of UNITE Community to vote against McCluskey when they (as waged employees) had no standing to do so. Skwawkbox reported that one of them Anna Turley had “fraudulently” declared herself to be unwaged and was now under investigation by UNITE.Turley sued for libel, and in 2019 damages of £75,000 were awarded in her favour. Skwawkbox’s Stephen Walker refused to name his source. The court found that it was not possible to identify how the

On gatekeeping  185

information had been passed to Walker but “given the nature of the information that was provided, the likelihood is that it must have originated from” UNITE.15 Owen Jones has written that Karie Murphy blocked moves to discipline Chris Williamson MP, before accepting the need to sanction him.16 In the words of one Labour staffer quoted by Jones, “Instead of backing Momentum’s efforts to oppose antisemitism on the left, the leader’s office let the idea [spread] that there was no real issue and Jon Lansman was a Zionist stooge”.17 The failure of the union-​backed left to play their historic role as the educators of the left was significant but cannot be blamed simply on a lack of political will. For even if the left had been led by a modern-​day incarnation of Eleanor Marx, the problem would still have arisen that where antisemitism was at its most intense (online) was where the unions were at their weakest. Historically, the social movements which equipped Labour voters with a coherent notion of the world were the socialist societies within Labour, meetings of Constituency Labour Parties and (yes) trade unions, and the activities of the Daily Herald newspaper which educated its hundreds of thousands of readers in anti-​war and egalitarian politics. But all these social movements have been hollowed out. As for the Herald, Rupert Murdoch bought it more than 50 years ago and it is now the Sun. We rely on people to come to politics fully formed and no one has created a culture in which online spaces are places of shared responsibility, so that if antisemitic or other inegalitarian ideas are expressed, they are immediately challenged. One of the themes of this book is that whenever a high-​profile figure slipped into language that approached racism, there were Corbyn supporters willing to come forward and exculpate the speaker. At several points, this book has been critical of JVL. One of the reasons for focussing on JVL is that several of its members had previously challenged instances of antisemitism on the left. This, in fact, is why figures such as Gilad Atzmon identified with the far right and not with the global left: because over a ten-​year period they had made attempts to infiltrate the far left. Atzmon had spoken at conferences of the Socialist Workers Party, and his records were glowingly reviewed by that group’s magazine Socialist Review.18 But he was rebuffed by a disciplined campaign begun by the blogger Richard Seymour,19 and taken up by Jewish socialists inside and outside that party.20 Similar processes of exclusion had befallen the Holocaust deniers of DYR, excluding them from membership of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.21 Although members of JVL had previously been alert to the risk of antisemitism emerging on the left, in 2015–​19 they defended each of Williamson, Livingstone, and Walker.22 There were of course differences between these individuals. Supporting one of these three might be defended as an exercise of judgment, two might at a stretch have been a coincidence, but backing all three made it feel as if there was a blanket rule in operation: all criticism of Corbyn supporters had, by definition, to be exaggerated, factional in origin, and simply wrong. There was a tradition of gatekeeping the borders of the far left and of excluding antisemites.Yet from 2016 onwards it fell into disuse. It collapsed because left-​wing

186  On gatekeeping

people were afraid of giving succour to the Labour right. We would not acknowledge that our side might be the problem. It is hard to know why so many on the left kept silent. Some activists struggled to balance the experience of seeing local Labour members with little profile being singled out (often unfairly), while at the same time accepting that the high-​profile cases were being rightly criticised. No doubt there were people who wanted to speak out but could not see how to do so without giving support to the likes of Margaret Hodge whose track record on fighting racism was mixed at best.23 Few people wanted to criticise Ken Livingstone, given his history as mayor of London, let alone Jeremy Corbyn. And how could you say anything about Jackie Walker without hounding a black woman? No doubt others kept quiet, especially on social media, because this is usually the healthiest way of surviving any online crisis, by keeping to yourself and avoiding the zealots on both sides. “Most people are unfamiliar with the history of antisemitism”, argues Jon Lansman, they “are terrified of saying the wrong thing in relation to accusations of antisemitism against the Left, and therefore certainly want to avoid rushing into saying anything”.24 Whatever the intention of those who kept silent, their inertia created the space for others to grow in importance –​for the likes of The Communists or Skwawkbox or The Canary to take on a greater significance than they deserved. In “normal” times, these might be fringe voices within the left, but the rules of normality had long ceased to apply. The subject of this book has been the Labour Party left. To choose this term is already to imply that the left has a main antagonist, the Labour right. There is, however, more than one right wing at any time. As we saw in the case of Luciana Berger –​by fighting the Labour right with so much vigour, by exaggerating the significance of its conflict with them, the Labour left failed in its conflict with a different kind of right-​wing politics –​the far-​r ight politics of Berger’s attackers. One of the demands of the anti-​Corbyn coalition was for “zero tolerance”, so that any instance of antisemitism should be answered with a lifetime ban. The idea of expelling every anti-​Jewish racist sounds necessary the first time you hear it, until you recall that amongst the allegations of antisemitism of which Corbyn was accused, for example, failed to tell his readers while writing a preface to John Hobson’s Imperialism that the book promotes an idea of capitalism as finance which was vulnerable to the idea that financiers were Jews.25 If our definition of antisemitism had been stretched wide enough to include negligence like that,26 then most historians of liberalism are guilty, since Hobson has usually treated as simply a heroic figure in liberal thought.27 Rather than reaching for outrage, we need to remember that the term antisemitism has been used to describe a range of behaviours: both action and inaction, violent words, smears, as well as any number of grey instances of behaviour about which even well-​meaning people might disagree. It has been used to describe instances of abuse, as well as the more amorphous mentality of indifference and denial. Proposing that each of these behaviours should receive the same sanction would raise up the most trivial incidents and flatten down the more significant.

On gatekeeping  187

For that reason, exclusion should not be the default response. Rather, as this book has argued (e.g., in the case of Jackie Walker), any principled reaction to much of what you might term “everyday antisemitism” would begin with an explanation, with an attempt to understand where this idea has come from, and an attempt to reason with it. Depending on the significance of the underlying act, of course, that moment of reasoning might be relatively short. But surely the purpose must be to create a set of people who understand why they caused offence and desire not to repeat it (more Naz Shahs), rather than to produce a category of embittered people who do not understand the harm they caused and only want revenge on their accusers. In spring 2019, several groups, including the Campaign against Antisemitism, and the JLM (an affiliate of the Labour Party), submitted information to EHRC, asking it to investigate Labour. What Jeremy Corbyn’s critics wanted, in spring 2019, was the approval of some independent body, which they could say had investigated the Labour Party without having prejudged the issue. The EHRC had only ever investigated one other political party for racism –​the neo-​fascist British National Party in summer 2010.28 The mere fact that Labour was being investigated put it in the same category as the BNP29 and was a source of shame to the left. The EHRC is not a large organisation; its team of full-​time solicitors is only as large as a high street firm. Most of its workload is policy, not litigation. Few lawyers would see the EHRC as a uniquely well-​informed collection of specialists, but it would be easy to present them to the press as a gathering of the best discrimination experts of their generation. Moreover, if we see referral to the EHRC as akin to a court, it was in another way different. If the EHRC could be persuaded to criticise Corbyn and his supporters in strident terms –​there would be no possibility of an appeal. Between the referral to the EHRC and its outcome, Labour lost a general election, and Corbyn himself was replaced as leader by former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. On this issue, as on others, Starmer’s focus was on conciliating the press.30 In the run-​up to the release of the EHRC report, several press stories indicated the direction of travel. On 7 April 2020, Keir Starmer met with the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Community Security Trust and promised to adopt any measures capable of restoring this group’s faith in the Labour leadership, including the automatic expulsion of anyone found to have committed an antisemitic act.31 An 851-​page dossier examining the record of the party’s outgoing leadership was leaked. It showed that the system was inadequate, and many cases were not logged, let alone investigated. The report challenged the press story that diligent Labour staffers had been holding back party investigations of antisemitism. It claimed that the Leadership Office had been required to petition senior Labour employees to act, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by other and senior officials who found reason after reason to delay. Investigation was prevented by “mistakes, deficiencies and missed opportunities to reform”, “bureaucratic drift and inertia”.32 The report was

188  On gatekeeping

also heavily criticised in turn, with its authors accused of seeking to protect Corbyn for factional reasons, and of selective quotation.33

EHRC report Many people hoped that with the publication of the EHRC’s report, Labour’s antisemitism crisis would reach a natural end. Some of us dared to hope that the commission –​which had been inundated with materials, naming altogether several hundred perpetrators of antisemitic language –​would give a flavour of what it had been shown and might help to explain to pro-​Corbyn readers that there really had been a problem. Instead, the EHRC report was, in the words of Tony Lerman of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research,“Repetitive, bureaucratic, and overly fixated on process and procedure”.34 One of the report’s key findings was that Labour acted unlawfully in that representatives of the party carried out acts of anti-​Jewish harassment. The problem with the report is that it focussed only on Labour’s elected representatives and therefore found that over a four-​year period, a party with half a million members and several thousand elected representatives had carried out only two unequivocal acts of harassment: “We found that the Labour Party, through its agents, committed harassment against its members in relation to Jewish ethnicity in the case of two individuals, Ken Livingstone and Pam Bromley”.35 Bromley was a councillor in Rossendale whose acts of harassment consisted of saying that allegations of antisemitism were false. As for Livingstone, the EHRC criticised him not for his remarks about Hitler having supported Zionism which the book has explored but for something else he said in the same interview, namely that he was wrong to have supported his colleague Naz Shah, given that she had already apologised for her actions.This, too, was labelled harassment. There was the same lack of judgment when we look at the words used by Bromley and the commission’s analysis of them. She had been expelled from Labour for having said, among other things, Had Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party pulled up the drawbridge and nipped the bogus AS [antisemitism] accusations in the bud in the first place we would not be where we are now and the fifth column in the LP [Labour Party] would not have managed to get such a foothold … the Lobby has miscalculated … The witch hunt has created brand new fightback networks … The Lobby will then melt back into its own cesspit.36 The EHRC criticised Bromley for saying that allegations of antisemitism were exaggerated; in so doing it downplayed the plain, old-​fashioned antisemitism that was being shouted off the page. Saying that Zionists emerge from “cesspit[s]‌” was to revert to the mental universe of antisemitism in the age of the pogroms. It was to associate Jews with excrement. It was to imagine Jews as a sub-​human species which emerged like the monsters of European imagination silently to work malice before disappearing into the shadows once more.

On gatekeeping  189

The EHRC said that it had seen other incidents of antisemitic behaviour when members of the Labour Party had diminished the scale or significance of the Holocaust, expressed support for Hitler or the Nazis, compared Israelis to Hitler or the Nazis, described a “witch hunt” in the Labour Party, or said that complaints had been manufactured by the “Israel lobby”.37 But it gave no details of these allegations, or how many people had used any of these phrases. The most important and shocking allegations were reduced to mere bullet points in a list. As the report acknowledged, the authors were investigating Labour at a time when hundreds of the party’s online supporters had accused other supporters of being traitors or being in the pay of a foreign power. To find, in that context, that the Labour Party had committed harassment –​but to provide just two examples of it –​was to give an open opportunity to all those people who wanted to minimise Labour’s problem and to pretend that if everyone on the left closed their eyes the problem would simply disappear. The EHRC spoke vividly of the damage done by factionalism on Labour’s left; its authors seemed incapable of seeing the harm done by the partisans of Labour’s right. Investigating allegations that a person had used humiliating words requires time and resource. I have described in previous chapters how an investigation began with a complaint, typically based on screenshots in which a member of the Labour Party was said to have used antisemitic language. From there, a second investigation would be conducted by the party, who would go through the accused person’s public social media accounts search for any other evidence of anti-​Jewish language. Done with care, this was inevitably a slow and drawn-​ our process. The EHRC report found that “the complaints process was not properly resourced”.38 Anyone who had thought at all deeply about the crisis would surely have responded –​how could that process have possibly been adequately resourced, when the method of investigating complaints was so protracted, and complaints were coming in at the rate they were? The Leadership Office was criticised by the commission for intervening in cases, especially in decisions about suspensions. This was undoubtedly a fair criticism. At the minimum, this created the impression that the left was protecting its own. The authors noted: We found evidence of political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints throughout the period of the investigation. We have concluded that this practice of political interference was unlawful. The evidence shows that staff from the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (LOTO) were able to influence decisions on complaints, especially decisions on whether to suspend.39

190  On gatekeeping

The commission explained the wrongs of interference in terms of the risk of indirect discrimination. “Jewish members are proportionately more likely than non-​Jewish members to make a complaint about antisemitism”,40 the authors argued, so that a process in which a left-​wing leadership shielded its leftist allies was to Jewish members’ detriment. That is true –​but a significant proportion of the acts of interference had been to demand more stringent action, not the protection of favourites. The EHRC criticised Corbyn’s team for intervening in these cases as well, saying that a process which was politically driven was also tainted, and could give no satisfaction to Jewish members that complaints were being investigated fairly. As an analysis of process, the authors were arguably right. As a piece of politics, they were unfair. It showed no understanding of the pressure that Corbyn and his allies had been under. The EHRC’s position was that if, say, the NEC decided to take no action against Livingstone or Williamson, the right thing for the leadership to do was to let the decision pass and to leave the underlying behaviour unpunished. Had Labour actually done that, then Corbyn’s leadership would have been criticised by Jewish representative groups and the press in even more strident terms than it was. The core recommendation of the report was that Labour should have passed on its disciplinary processes to an independent body which could have investigated complaints fairly without subjecting its decisions to the demands of a factional war.41 This proposal was obvious good sense and its implementation long overdue. On the other hand, the basis under which the EHRC criticised Corbyn’s leadership was inadequate. Near the end of the report, the authors wrote, “It is hard not to conclude that antisemitism within the Labour Party could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so”.42 During Labour’s crisis, the left (as a whole) did fail to grasp the rise of antisemitism in wider society or its increasing use by the members of the party, and our collective reaction to the likes of Ken Livingstone or Chris Williamson was one of silence when it should have been to speak up. The leadership, in common with the party as a whole, failed to acknowledge the scale of the problem. It made itself open to criticism. But the EHRC’s proof that the leadership was at fault was anything but convincing. To quote the passage as a whole, The Labour Party has shown an ability to act decisively when it wants to, through the introduction of a bespoke process to deal with sexual harassment complaints. It is hard not to conclude that antisemitism within the Labour Party could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so.43 Saying that because Labour had, on paper, a much better policy for dealing with sexual harassment, a similar document would have solved the antisemitism crisis was plainly unconvincing. People who care about sexism know that the left has repeatedly mishandled that issue too: with trade union leaders accused,44 and MPs subject to harassment complaints which dragged on for years without investigation.45

On gatekeeping  191

Labour’s handling of the crisis was not caused, ultimately, by the absence of a policy whether akin to the party’s documents on sexual harassment or suitable in some other way (you could call this the Chakrabarti fallacy) but by the unwillingness of many members to admit that the problem of antisemitism was real. This combined with the huge volume of complaints to cause investigators to adopt shortcut means of resolving disputes (e.g., taking no action against those merely sharing other people’s antisemitic posts) which left the underlying behaviour in place.

Aftermath On the publication of the report, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from membership of the Labour Party. He was then reinstated three weeks later (although the party leadership refused to restore the whip to him). Corbyn was not punished for anything in the report, although it was critical of his leadership, but for his response to the report and for saying that “the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party”.46 The authors of the EHRC report had spoken of how belittling complaints of antisemitism runs the risk of becoming actual harassment. In the content of Livingstone’s defence of Naz Shah, they wrote, “the effect of these comments was humiliating, denied the victims’ experience, diminished the issue, and had the effect of stirring up and fuelling hatred for Jews”.47 It seems that for the people who suspended Corbyn, similar reasoning applied; in saying that the scale of the problem had been “overstated”, they believed he was causing a hostile environment for Jews. If so, they misunderstood how our legal definition of harassment works. For one of the small failings of the EHRC report was that its authors had considered only section 26(1) of the Equality Act 2010, the general definition of harassment as behaviour which creates hostile environments for others, and not section 26(4). That provision sets out that in deciding whether conduct did create that environment, you must consider not just the perception of its victims, but also whether it is reasonable for the conduct to have that effect. Deciding whether conduct was harassment is not simply about whether it offends people, but whether they were right to be offended. Corbyn sought to clarify his remarks, insisting that in speaking of the problem as “overstated”, he meant the press coverage of the crisis, and the way it had given the impression that tens or hundreds of thousands of Labour members had used antisemitic words. Now, a reaction of denial could, in different circumstances, have amounted to unlawful harassment. Suppose that Corbyn’s remarks had been more specific. Imagine that we were not talking about antisemitism in general but one person’s experience of it. So, if he had said, for example, that the scale of the abuse directed at Luciana Berger had been overstated, this is a comment which could reasonably have caused her such distress as to be harassment, and for her to be justified in complaining about him. But he was not talking about any specific individual.

192  On gatekeeping

What he was saying rather is that Labour’s opponents (the Conservative press) had misrepresented the scale of the party’s difficulties. Alternatively, it is possible to imagine circumstances where some process of collective suffering was so shared and intense that the denial of it would constitute harassment. Using language of Holocaust denial to a Jewish person could easily be harassment –​because the Holocaust is such a shared and defining Jewish experience. Plenty of Jewish people feel profoundly and right upset at the misuse of that history –​whether they are survivors, or their descendants, or just people who have grown up among other Jews. But the reason that such language causes such distress is because of the scale of Holocaust: it was a process of starving and shooting and killing which took millions of lives, and even today there are people alive who either escaped from the killings or have had their lives structured by having to deal with the misery and suffering they caused. When Corbyn said the press had exaggerated the extent of antisemitism within the Labour Party, any offence he could have caused was modest compared to these two examples. Pretending that in using those words Corbyn had actually created an “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” for many or all Jewish members of the party was itself to magnify the extent of his offence for factional purposes. It was to ignore not just the few supporters of Corbyn in groups such as JVL who were incapable of being offended, but a much broader swathe of Jewish opinion for whom his was an honest and arguable if ill-​timed response. The EHRC report did little to convey the extent of antisemitism within the Labour Party, but that did not make the EHRC antisemitic. On the same approach, Corbyn was not harassing others by criticising the handling of the crisis by the press and the Labour right. Trying to explain the situation in the Labour Party to the readers of left-​wing magazine, The Nation, at the end of 2020, Corbyn supporter Rachel Shabi wrote, Corbyn’s suspension was a divisive overreaction, which his supporters are reasonably contesting. And the Labour leadership’s response, including barring local party meetings from discussing the issue, is both disturbing and counterproductive.48 But there was, Shabi continued, a depressing familiarity to this whole scenario. Some in the left camp are not just protesting Corbyn’s suspension but also deflecting criticism of the way he responded to the EHRC and the issue itself.49 By winter 2020, both the number of investigations and the proportion leading to expulsion were higher than they had ever been. Both facts were leaked to the press and cited as proof that the leadership was at last doing what it should and treating antisemitism with the care it deserved. What was happening, in reality, was

On gatekeeping  193

that the notion of unconscionable behaviour was being expanded beyond any justifiable point. An increasing number of expulsions were for what might be termed “satellite” antisemitism, in the sense that lawyers talk of satellite litigation to mean cases where courts are no longer deciding an original harm but litigating the consequences of previous litigation. Members were being suspended for sharing platforms with those who had been expelled for antisemitism, or for attending political events at which someone expelled for antisemitism had been present (whether or not the member knew they would be there or spoke to them). So, for example, in November 2020 a letter was sent suspending Moche Machover, a veteran Jewish Israeli political activist who had been forced to leave Israel for Britain as a result of his anti-​Zionist activities and joined the Labour Party in 2016. Machover was given details of protests he had attended, asked to confirm whether he was aware that individuals who had been expelled from the Party had been on those protests with him, and instructed to respond under threat of expulsion.50 The justification given for the extension of zero tolerance beyond antisemitic acts to those associating with previously expelled members was the strict language of the Labour Party’s Code of Conduct, which states that “Those who consistently abuse and spread hate should be shunned and not engaged with in a way that ignores this behaviour”. This sentence was treated as if it contained two potential breaches of the Labour Party Code, either (1) (a positive act) of encouraging former members in their antisemitism, or (2) (an omission) of failing to shun them. What if another member of the Labour Party in good standing was to approach an expelled member, talk to them, remind them of their previous behaviour, and seek to challenge it consistently, over time, as might befit a former member whose behaviour had been at different times both comradely and objectionable? The principle that failing to shun an expelled member breaches the rulebook makes the well-​meaning friend a wrongdoer himself. It also has the consequence of making antisemitism a greater offence from the perspective of the Labour Party than any crime is in the sight of the British state. For we have in our society all sorts of people whose roles are to engage with former offenders, to educate them and reintegrate them into society after their punishment has ended. Criminals are human beings and capable of redemption. The new Labour regime deemed the antisemite, by contrast, incapable of ever learning or changing. The problem was that Labour was only learning half the lessons it needed to.Yes, Labour needed to crack down much harder on instances of antisemitism, and the party needed quicker and more robust complaints procedures. And yes, the left of the party needed to get its house in order. But Labour also needed a much broader understanding of antisemitism, one which properly understood its commonality to as well as its differences from other forms of racism. The Party needed to have a sense of the totality of where antisemitism was coming from. Labour needed to deepen its understanding of global politics rather than engaging in a new round of silencing.

194  On gatekeeping

Labour’s new approach towards the problem (in common with the attitude of the press and of the bodies from which Labour took a lead) was superficial, even frivolous. Recall the figures set out in the first chapter of book: one in six people in Britain and one in six people in Labour believe that Jews have too much power in the media, one in five that Jews are disloyal to the UK, and one in ten would be unhappy if their relative married a Jew. This form of prejudice is therefore widespread. Rather than challenging anyone to think about the situation differently, Labour was simply seeking to cast those seen holding these ideas as far away from it as the party could. The party, as so often under Keir Starmer, was more concerned with looking good than doing good.

The frustration of socialists with Jews In the concluding chapters of this book, I would ask readers to recall an older Jewish tradition which believed the long racist treatment of Jewish people which culminated in the Holocaust was wrong because it caused suffering, and because it represented the unjust treatment of a group of people. It held, in other words, that what was wrong about the Holocaust was not only that this was the attempted extermination of the Jews (although it was undoubtedly that) but also that it was genocide, a crime to be always fought, whenever and whoever was its victim.51 Readers who lived through the final years of the Cold War may recall the story of the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), which was held in London in 1903, and was long seen as a defining moment of twentieth-​century history. The intended gathering of Russian Socialists descended into a bitter controversy as to which group should be entitled to lead the nascent party. One faction, the Bolsheviks, argued that to be in good standing a member of the RSDLP must agree to support their party by “personal participation in one of the party organisations”. Their rivals, the Mensheviks, suggested a looser commitment, that members merely associate with the party “under the direction of one of the party organisations”. After 1903, and slowly, a certain myth was spread about this gathering, in which the whole story of Communist success over the next eight decades was put down to this moment and the greater commitment implied in the Bolshevik formulation. Either it created a party of thick-​skinned people capable of surviving adversity or (depending on your political perspective) a movement of fanatics. That part of the story is well-​known; what is often forgotten is who attended the London Congress, for 51 delegates were in attendance, five of whom supported the Jewish Bund. How many votes should they be allowed? The question arises because the best estimate of the membership of the Bund at this time was 30,000 people, while all of the other RSDLP factions combined did not add up to more than 10,000 members. It was assumed that votes should be determined based on who was in the room, rather than how much support they represented. If voting had been done by card votes, in proportion to the membership of each group, then on every contentious issue the Bund would have outvoted all its rivals by four to one.52

On gatekeeping  195

The point of recalling this history is to remind people that before 1917, if European socialists had intended to distinguish between Jewish and non-​Jewish Socialists, they could not have missed the fact that in key parts of the Pale –​the area of historic Jewish settlement between the Prussian and Tsarist empire (and from which a majority of the Jewish population of Britain ultimately derives) –​Socialists were Jews and Jews were Socialists. That tradition was at its clearest in the decade or so after 1918, in the figures of Leon Trotsky or his German counterparts Eugen Leviné and Ernst Toller. Its weight is less than it was, but it did not die out all at once. The commitment of Jews to equality for all could be seen just as clearly in the participation of Jews in the civil rights movements in 1960s America (two-​thirds of the white volunteers who went south for Freedom Summer in 1964 were Jewish)53 or in the generation of Jewish South Africans who 60 years later suffered exile or imprisonment in order to help bring down apartheid –​the likes of Ronnie Kasrils, Denis Goldberg, or Ruth First. The overlap of these two categories of Jew and Socialist did not necessarily protect the former from antisemitism nor did it make the latter immune to it. For as the historian of the Russian Revolution Brendan McGeever makes clear, the eruption of the masses into history in 1917 was also the occasion for a huge rise in anti-​Jewish violence. Mostly, this was the work of the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the post-​1918 Civil War who presented the Communists as “Yids” and merely the latest of a centuries-​long succession of exploiters of the native Ukrainian and Russian people. But, in resisting this violence, Communists were hampered by parts of their ideological inheritance and especially by the attempt to challenge antisemitism with a simple language of class, for anti-​Jewish racism reframed itself as a movement of “workers” against “the bourgeoisie”, placing Jews as affluent professionals and city-​dwellers within the latter category. In March 1918 at Hlukhiv and 1919 in Uman (both in the Ukraine), pogroms were led by Red Guards, killing in the first instance more than 100 and in the second 150 Jewish people.54 In McGeever’s narrative, the persistence of antisemitism was so great that even such prominent figures as Leon Trotsky felt an irresistible pressure to hold back from taking leadership roles within the Communist Party for fear of giving an opportunity to antisemites.55 The real heroes of his story are not the prominent Bolsheviks –​many of whom equivocated in the face of events they did not control –​but a generation of Jewish Socialists (many of them former Zionists, or former Bundists). As one wrote, “[The Bolsheviks], the armed carriers of socialism, are now the only force which can oppose the pogroms”.56 They were motivated by the threat of anti-​Jewish violence, were allowed into leadership roles, and organised against antisemitism. The complex history of these struggles points away from the post-​1948 history of Jewish people in which a true Jewish essence could be accomplished only in the moment that Israel was born in conquest and through the dispossession of the Palestinians. Alongside that history of Jews proving themselves “upward”, there is also another story of Jews “identifying downwards”, of contributing to the struggles for equality and civil rights.57

196  On gatekeeping

Yet the fact that many Jews have been on the left does not prevent feelings of disappointment arising on the left today –​the idea that Jews are not what they once were. That too few Jewish people prove themselves in a struggle against the Israeli state, that too many read the Daily Telegraph, or inhabit comfortable homes in North London. Just as there exist on the right philosemites who are attracted by a one-​sided assumption that Jews are all warmongers and are disappointed by the reality of Jewish life,58 so there are on the left people who expect every Jew they meet to be as red as Rosa Luxemburg,59 and are disappointed by real Jews and shocked that they turn out to be both as brave and as fearful, as generous, and as cautious as everyone else.60 In Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s book Left Out, there is an interview with Andrew Murray, another official of the UNITE union who was loaned by the union to Corbyn’s team and worked for the Labour Party as a consultant in 2018 and 2019. Asked to explain the failure of the Labour left to empathise with Britain’s Jews, he told them: Racism in British society since the Second World War ... means discrimination at work, discrimination in housing, hounding by the police on the streets, discrimination, and disadvantage in education, demonisation and mischaracterisation in the mass media.61 For a whole generation of socialists in their fifties and older, Murray insisted, that is what racism was: a story of economic disadvantage and hostile policing. Jews, he insisted, had not been any part of this story. Murray also drew on the tradition of left-​wing anti-​fascism. He insisted, however, that Jews were outside that story –​and had not been the fascists’ main target: The fascists I knew in the 1970s didn’t go out Jew-​hunting, they went out Paki-​bashing.62 Returning to the views of the Labour Party, and of his generation in it, Murray continued: They would say, “Of course Jewish migrants to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century –​they lived in appalling conditions. They had it rough, they were attached by the fascists. But you know, that was then. The Jewish community’s moved on. It’s developed, it’s integrated”.63 The purpose of citing this passage is not to criticise Murray who was being self-​ critical and moving towards the realisation that different kinds of racism might emerge or grow for different reasons, that the history of antisemitism is determined by its ideological use, and that it contributes to and is shaped by a paranoid way of understanding the world.

On gatekeeping  197

Yet the historical model underpinning this left analysis of antisemitism is ill-​ judged. British Jews are not all like to each other: there are rich Jews and poor Jews and everything in between. Indeed, Jews were never a single group of people but have always been divided by age, gender, and class, and that this was no less apparent in the 1930s than it is today. The idea that fascists have been leaving Jews alone for the past 70 years is incapable of grasping what has happened in the world since 2016, or what happened to Luciana Berger. The history of racism is more complex than simply the idea that here is an oppressed minority, its members are excluded from jobs and homes and equal treatment, and the more abject their position becomes, the greater the racial hostility to them. For example, the years from 1950 to 1965 saw the greatest sustained period of growth in modern economic history, with economies in each of the first, second, and third worlds experiencing growth rates of four percent or more per year. Rising incomes combined redistributive taxation to make societies rapidly more egalitarian. In Europe and the United States, this was in particular a boom period for white members of ethnic minorities (e.g., the Italians in the United States, or the Irish in England, and so on) several of who were fully absorbed for the first time into the white majority. Yet the same period also saw intense periods of discrimination. So, between the late 1940s and the mid-​1950s, American politics was dominated by a fear of Communism. At the centrepiece of the McCarthyite system were the hearings of the House Un-​American Activities Committee, which writers, actors, and civil servants were compelled to attend, and were quizzed on their trade union activities, their homosexuality, or anything else which might prove their actual or latent Communism. The only two people to be killed in this period on account of their espionage for the Soviet Union, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were Jews.64 As the historian Benjamin Balthaser writes, “Over half of Americans associated Jews with communist espionage. Six members of the Hollywood Ten were Jewish.Two-​thirds of those questioned in the 1952 McCarthy hearings were Jewish, despite Jews accounting for under two percent of the American population”.65 It is possible, in other words, to be both a “rising” ethnic minority –​to have greater access to jobs and housing –​and yet to be, at the same time, the object of paranoia and fantasy. There is a further problem with Murray’s account. For as he tells the story, the most important force is the left, to which Jews are expected to accommodate themselves. From there (even if Murray himself showed no sign of doing this), it would be a small step to say that it would be easier for the left to sympathise with Britain’s Jews if they were as poor and as proletarian as their counterparts of a century before. The alternative to this kind of crass thinking is to stop expecting Jewish people to behave like an analytical category (“globalists” in the ideology of the far right, or “an integrated ethnic minority” in the approach Murray is summarising) and to let them be whatever they want. It is to give up on the old philosemitic ambition of “making Jews better citizens on the world”.66 It is to oppose antisemitism as you would oppose all other racisms, that is, without putting any conditions on the people who experience it.

198  On gatekeeping

Notes 1 B. Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe in (London: Penguin, 2017), pp. 129–​ 131; ‘Elizabeth Warren Agrees Democratic Race “Rigged” for Clinton,’ BBC News, 3 November 2017; E. Schultz, ‘Leaked Document Shows the DNC Wanted Clinton From Start,’ New York Post, 16 June 2016; N. Allen, ‘Hillary Clinton Faces Mass Dissent Over “Dirty Tricks” on Bernie Sanders,’ Daily Telegraph, 25 July 2016. 2 D. O’Sullivan, ‘Vengeance Is Mine,’ Jacobin, 18 November 2016. 3 D. Renton, ‘Change the World by Taking Power,’ Jacobin, 2 December 2015. 4 L. Goodall, Left for Dead? The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party (London:William Collins, 2018), p. 212. 5 D. Renton, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right (London: Pluto, 2019), p. 209. 6 J. Guinan, ‘In and Against, and Outside, the Party,’ Red Pepper, 15 September 2020. 7 L. Young, Rise: How Jeremy Corbyn Inspired the Young to Create a New Socialism (London: Simon and Schuster, 2018), pp. 87–​90. 8 Compare the discussion of the incompleteness and narrowness of Labour’s political vision in 1945–​51, its unwillingness to criticise these institutions even when equipped with a huge majority, in R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–​ 1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 534–​536. 9 N. Baram, A Land without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Melbourne: Text, 2015), p. 283. 10 J. Butler, ‘Failed Vocation,’ London Review of Books, 3 December 2020. 11 Jones, This Land, p. 251. 12 R. Seymour, ‘Media Review –​The Canary,’ Telesur, 28 March 2017. For a similar, extended, criticism of Skwawkbox, B. Pitt, ‘More Fairy Tales from Skwawkbox,’ Medium, 23 April 2019. 13 Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 14 ‘Exclusive: The Moment and Real Reason Karie Murphy Lost Her LOTO Position,’ Skwawkbox, 20 October 2019; ‘Exclusive: the Truth about “That” Shadow Cabinet Meeting,’ Skwawkbox, 20 October 2019; ‘Smears v Murphy “Lowest Ever” “Absolute Lies” for Which “No Shred of Evidence”, Say Senior Labour Sources,’ 2 February 2020. 15 Turley v UNITE the Union & Anor [2019] EWHC 3547, para 46. 16 Jones, This Land, p. 253. 17 Jones, This Land, p. 251. 18 “Another song is dedicated to Ken Livingstone who he describes, wrongly but understandably, as ‘the only brave man in western politics’...” B. Richardson, ‘Music Will Free Itself,’ Socialist Review, April 2005. 19 R. Seymour, ‘Anti-​Fascist and Anti-​Antisemitic,’ Lenin’s Tomb, 25 July 2004. 20 R. Rance, ‘Gilad Atzmon Bookmarks Protest,’ Jews against Zionism, 19 June 2005. 21 See Chapter 13. 22 ‘Ken Livingstone’s Resignation from the Labour Party,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 23 May 2018; ‘The Expulsion of Jackie Walker Is a Great Injustice,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 27 March 2019; ‘Reinstate Jackie Walker! Sign the Letter the Guardian Refused to Print,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 9 April 2019; ‘In Defence of Chris Williamson,’ Jewish Voice for Labour, 2 July 2019. 23 In 2006–​9, Margaret Hodge gave several interviews in which she treated all white working-​class voters as racist and insisted that Labour could succeed only by conciliating them. In one interview, in April 2006, Margaret Hodge said 80 percent of white families in her east London constituency were tempted to vote for the British National Party. In local elections later that year, the BNP won 11 of the seats in which it stood, causing

On gatekeeping  199

even one of the most moderate unions active in Hodge’s constituency, the GMB, to demand her resignation.The BNP delivered a bunch of flowers to her office to thank her for her comments. In 2007, Hodge argued that white voters could be appeased if British “indigenous famil[ies]” were given preferential treatment in accessing council houses. ‘Minister Says BNP Tempting Voters,’ BBC News, 16 April 2006; ‘MP “Should Go” over BNP Comments,’ BBC News, 24 May 2006; P. Johnson, ‘Hodge: “Give Natives Priority for Social Housing”,’ Telegraph, 21 May 2007; A. Stratton, ‘Margaret Hodge Renews Warning to Counter BNP threat,’ Guardian, 30 May 2009. 24 Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 25 One theme of Hobson’s book is titled ‘Economic Parasites of Imperialism’ and refers to capitalism as a system, “controlled … by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience”, before asking rhetorically: “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?” D. Sugarman, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Described Century-​Old Antisemitic Book as “Brilliant” and “a Great Tome”,’ Jewish Chronicle, 30 April 2019. 26 Causing one historian Donald Sassoon to write, “No one has ever felt the need to highlight the 10 lines or so, in a book of 400 pages, which are antisemitic, but Corbyn was expected to do so”. D. Sassoon,‘Jeremy Corbyn, Hobson’s Imperialism, and Antisemitism,’ Guardian, 2 May 2019.That “no one” is too strong. In 1951,Arendt had seen and criticised Hobson’s racism. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017 edn), p. 31. As did David Feldman in early 2019, in an essay published to accompany an exhibition in the Jewish Museum. D. Finkelstein, ‘I Was Attacked for Exposing Corbyn’s Endorsement of an Antisemitic Book, but I Had to,’ Jewish Chronicle, 31 May 2019; also D. Feldman, ‘Jeremy Corbyn, “Imperialism”, and Labour’s Antisemitism Problem,’ History Workshop, 12 June 2019. 27 So, in A. J. P. Taylor’s The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–​ 1939 (London: Faber, 1957), p. 100, Hobson is characterised as “the most original and profound of the new Radical writers”, and credited with laying the foundations of both British Keynesianism and Soviet foreign policy, but no mention is made of his antisemitism. In Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-​History (London: Verso, 2011), a book sensitive to liberalism racialised origins, Hobson is praised for his acknowledgment of the colour-​racism on which the British empire rested, without any reckoning with his antisemitism, pp. 226–​227. In Edmund Fawcett’s more recent Liberalism:The Life of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Hobson is treated as a “new liberal” economist close to but parting from neo-​mercanitilism. No mention is made of his antisemitism (pp. 207–​208). 28 A. S. Kirchner, A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combating Political Extremism (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 61–​62, 79–​81. 29 H.Yorke, ‘Labour Antisemitism Sees Party Join BNP in Being Probed by Human Rights Watchdog,’ Telegraph, 28 May 2019. 30 D. Renton, ‘Keir Starmer’s Past Is Coming under Scrutiny.What Can We Learn From It?’ Guardian, 16 February 2020. 31 J. Murphy, ‘Keir Starmer: How I’ll Rid Labour of Antisemitism,’ Evening Standard, 7 April 2019. 32 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014–​2019,’ Labour Party, March 2020, pp. 11, 15, 424. The report was seized on by Corbyn supporters: A. Bastani, ‘ “It’s Going to Be a Long Night” –​How Members of Labour’s Senior Management Team Campaigned to Lose,’ Novara, 12 April 2020;

200  On gatekeeping

J. Trickett, and I. Lavery, ‘The Leaked Labour Party Report Is Shameful. It’s Time for an Investigation,’ Jacobin, 13 April 2020; M. Machover, ‘Weaponising “Antisemitism”,’ Weekly Worker, 23 April 2020. 33 D. Rich, ‘Who Is to Blame for Antisemitism in Britain’s Labour Party?’ Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 3/​2 (2020), pp. 1–​10; J. Ware, ‘Debunking the Holy Grail: The Corbynites’ Leaked Report on the Antisemitism Crisis,’ Jewish Chronicle, 27 August 2020; ‘Leaked Email from Corbyn Ally Shows He Recognised That Controversial Leaked Labour Report Was Misleading and Feared the Consequences,’ Campaign against Antisemitism, 27 July 2000. 34 A. Lerman, ‘Fighting Labour Antisemitism Must Not Come at the Cost of Palestinian Rights,’ 972 Magazine, 26 November 2020. 35 Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party (London: EHRC, 2020), p. 25. 36 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 28. 37 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 31. 38 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 7. 39 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 14. 40 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 55. 41 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 12. 42 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 101. 43 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 101. 44 ‘Tim Roache Resigns as GMB General Secretary,’ LabourList, 28 April 2020. 45 PA Media, ‘Kelvin Hopkins Quits Labour before Conclusion of Sexual Harassment Inquiry,’ Guardian, 9 January 2021. 46 J. Scott, ‘Why Was Jeremy Corbyn Suspended from the Labour Party?’ BBC News, 30 October 2020. 47 Investigation into Antisemitism, p. 31. 48 R. Shabi, ‘The British Labour Party’s Antisemitism Problem,’ The Nation, 10 December 2020. 49 Shabi, ‘The British Labour Party’s.’ 50 Labour Party to Moshe Machover, 30 November 2020, questions 5, 6, and 9. 51 The ideas being engaged with here include Hannah Arendt’s criticisms of the prosecution case in the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the Jewish chauvinism which she saw beneath it. R. Fine and P. Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left: on the Return of the Jewish Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 83; ‘The Formidable Dr Robinson,’ in H. Arendt, The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), pp. 496–​511. I also bear in mind the critique of Arendt from a perspective of “multidirectional” human liberation in M. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 33–​65. I am not supporting the idea that the Holocaust is simply a single instance of a recurring phenomenon of genocide, which can be studied or opposed without any interest in the particularity of its victims. That expunging of the specific content of the Holocaust is something I have challenged previously in D. Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999); D. Renton, Fascism: History and Theory (London: Pluto, 2020), pp. 125–​139. For criticism of the tendency during the crisis to diminish the specificity of the Holocaust, and to downplay the scale of the Nazis’ exterminationist ambitions, M. Bolton,‘Conceptual Vandalism, Historical Distortion:The Labour Antisemitism Crisis and the Limits of Class Instrumentalism,’ Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 3/​2 (2020), pp. 11–​30, esp. 24–​25; and D. M. Seymour, ‘Holocaust Memory: Between Universal and Particular,’ in D. M. Seymour and M. Camino (eds), The Holocaust in the Twenty-​First Century (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 15–​31.

On gatekeeping  201

52 A. Brossat and S. Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (London:Verso, 2017), p. 33. For the history of the Congress and the part played in it by the Bund, B. Pearce (ed), 1903: Second Ordinary Congress of the RSDLP (London: New Park, 1978), pp. 45–​47, 74–​76, 193–​195. 53 P. Berman (ed), Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), p. 13. 54 B. McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 42, 103. 55 McGeever, Antisemitism, pp. 209–​210. 56 McGeever, Antisemitism, p. 157. The same generation are also the subject of C. Abramsky, ‘Zionism and Bolshevism,’ Tablet Mag, 17 December 2020. 57 K. Kahn-​Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity (London: Repeater, 2019), p. 95. 58 J. Burchill, Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philosemite (London: Unbound, 2014); E. Dugan, ‘What Did This Lesbian Rabbi Do to Make Julie Burchill Mad?’ Independent, 26 September 2014. 59 For Luxemburg’s universalist socialism, and her lack of interest in Jewish suffering, D. Mills, Rosa Luxemburg (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), pp. 44, 66, 88–​9l; C. Abramsky, ‘Zionism and Bolshevism,’ Tablet Mag, 17 December 2020. 60 Kahn-​Harris, Strange Hate, p. 108. 61 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, pp. 120–​121. 62 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, pp. 120–​121. In reality, groups such as the National Front were hardened ideological antisemites, who needed anti-​Jewish racism to explain why the left, and so many people in wider society, were opposed to them.To take just a single example of a recurring theme of Front literature, M. Webster, Lifting the Lid off the ‘Anti-​ Nazi League’ (London: National Front News Press, 1978) 63 Pogrund and Maguire, Left Out, pp. 120–​121. 64 K. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, New jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 9. 65 B. Balthaser, ‘The Death and Life of the Jewish Century,’ Boston Review, 20 March 2019. For attempts by some Jewish authorities to ingratiate themselves with McCarthy’s movement, H. Draper, ‘The Face of the Crowd at the McCarthy Rally,’ Labour Action, 6 December 1954. 66 See Arendt’s critique of the eighteenth-​century philosopher Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, as summarised in Fine and Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left, p. 16.

16 ANTISEMITISM AND BLACK EMANCIPATION

By summer 2020, Labour’s antisemitism scandal was already receding from the headlines. New political stories were breaking, different combinations of people were forming, and the distant prospect was already being raised that these new forces might begin the process of reconstituting the left –​and the Labour Party. The most important of these was Black Lives Matter (BLM) which brought onto the streets of America a protest movement of a scale not seen since the 1960s, and with solidarity movements in Britain. Every Premiership footballer in Britain took their knee in support of BLM, and even the new Labour leader Keir Starmer briefly joined in. In response to BLM, a number of Corbyn’s critics argued that BLM, or indeed any anti-​racist project, would inevitably fail Jewish people. And that, for Labour to learn the lessons of the past five years, Labour must distance itself from BLM both in Britain and in the United States. Writing first in the Spectator and in the Telegraph, one journalist, Zoe Strimpel, insisted that anti-​racist movements repeatedly foster antisemitism. This is because, she reasoned, the most committed anti-​racists see Jews as part of a colonialist and racist Zionist conspiracy, manifested in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. It’s no wonder that the Black Lives Matter movement has a blind spot when it comes to antisemitism. Jews, after all, are easily elided with ideas of the monstrous Jewish state, as Corbyn’s party made clear.1 Anti-​Zionism, she complained, allows Jews to be cast as the white oppressor: [W]‌hich means when we draw attention to antisemitism, we are often accused of right-​wing manipulation and conspiracy. And so, the same unforgiving standards applied to racists by the hard left are never used towards antisemites. 2

Antisemitism and black emancipation  203

This meant that anti-​racism protesters would never criticise, for example, the cultural symbols of anti-​Jewish racism –​they were simply blind to it: While everyone from Rhodes to Dickens to Fawlty Towers to obscure 18th century merchants have been singled out for removal on racist grounds, nobody has scanned our history for anti-​Jewish associations ... [The] anti-​ racism movement’s cultural cleansing arm should stretch to all this, but it can’t and won’t.3 What conclusions would anyone draw from Strimpel’s piece? For what she seemed to be insisting that anti-​racism could never be made good. Anti-​racism never understood the Jews. It was inevitably doomed to tolerate antisemitism. Such arguments can be seen as part of a longer Jewish history in which racism against Jews is seen as the only standard of racism, and compared to stop and search, the racist distribution of jobs and houses and the suffering endured by black people in Britain or America can be cast as a more recent and trivial counterpart. Thus Cynthia Ozick, in a previous generation, began with an argument as to what racism was, “a wholesale act of the body politics ... a mob on the prowl”, and used that to insist that there had been only ever black racism against Jews and never racism in reverse.4 But anti-​black racism is not merely, as Ozick cast it, a mob on the prowl, it is also a system for the allocations of resources between people, a series of a hundred daily obstacles and insults, a way of being to which the collective leadership of Anglo-​Jewry has made as little protest as it manifested in challenging the opinions of Donald Trump. Any number of Corbyn supporters have suggested that the solution to Labour’s crisis is a return to anti-​racist first principles. So, the historians and sociologists Brendan McGeever and David Feldman have argued for the remaking of the “personal connections and institutional alliances that would create a consistent anti-​racist practice”.5 It is striking that in the United States this has been the majority approach of mainstream Jewish opinion, so that when BLM was reborn in May 2020 following the death of George Floyd, dozens of Jewish groups spoke out in favour of the protests. Those who did included Jewish campaigns for social justice (T’ruah, and Keshet), campaigns associated with Reform Judaism (the Religious Action Center), movements against antisemitism (the ADL) as well as politically liberal campaigns (the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women), as well as the Rabbinical Assembly (an association of rabbis from the Conservative and Masorti strands of Judaism), and the Orthodox Union.6 In America, where Jews lived in the epicentre of a global increase in anti-​Jewish racism, where their president actively encouraged that racism, and at a time which witnessed the most violent antisemitic attacks in all of American history, Jewish opinion has consolidated leftwards, with a solid four out of five Jewish voters identifying as “soft” or “strong” Democrats in summer 2020. Some 51 percent of American Jews blame the political right for antisemitism, only 12 percent the left.

204  Antisemitism and black emancipation

According to one think-​tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, by 2020, up to 25 percent of American Jews identified as anti-​Zionist and approve of the work of Arab human rights centres in Israel, or campaigns to boycott or divest from Israeli institutions.7 Meanwhile, in Britain –​although we are much further from the epicentre of the conflict –​the collective understanding of it has been almost the opposite. In spring 2020, a number of WhatsApp group messages were made public which had been shared by Labour’s senior employees. Several of the officials denigrated in particular black MPs on Labour’s left. They were dismissive of the promotion of Dawn Butler MP to the Shadow Cabinet. They wrote of Diane Abbott MP that “Abbott is truly repulsive”, and that she “literally makes me sick”. Among officers working in Labour’s compliance unit, those charged with rooting out racism in the party, Clive Lewis MP, was described as “the biggest cunt out of the lot”.8 The content of these messages was ignored by the Jewish press, the Conservative press, and by newspapers such as the Guardian which had long framed the struggle against Corbyn as a contest between the virtuous Labour right and the tainted left.9 The authors of those comments suffered (as indeed did many other people discussed in this book) from the mistaken and destructive belief that the interests of Jewish people on the one hand and black or Muslim people on the other must necessarily be opposed. You could notice and reject anti-​Jewish racism; you could notice and reject anti-​black racism; you could not do both. Indeed, the more you did one, the less capable you were of doing the other. Such politics seems to envisage a tearing up of the remaining links between Jewish and black opinion on the grounds that no one else can ever be trusted to support Jews. Such a philosophy is strictly, on its own terms, an anti-​racism: it begins from the premise that Jewish people have been the victims of hatred for centuries and that this hatred is returning. On the contrary, it is profoundly hostile to the politics of liberation should any other group of people also demand that. But there is no reason to insist that the interests of Jews and other minorities must be traded off against each other. If we look narrowly within the anti-​racist tradition, at “the hard left” so disliked by the Labour right, and at its black Marxist adherents, we can see a patient attempt to resist antisemitism. There has been a generosity of spirit which is easily forgotten. Here I will focus on just three examples.10 The first is Aimé Césaire, a Communist poet and political activist from Martinique whose 1950 pamphlet, Discourse on Colonialism, had as its theme the relationship between the European colonial powers and the collapse of Europe into fascism. Much of what interested Césaire was the dynamic by which colonialism had dehumanised both the victims of empire and its rulers, who had been encouraged into race hatred and violence. Racism, he insisted, had made Europeans accomplices to murder, a process which they ignored because, until the Holocaust, it had been applied only to non-​ European peoples.

Antisemitism and black emancipation  205

So far, you might think that Césaire sounds almost like the sort of activist about which the Labour right warned –​an anti-​racist indifferent to the special suffering of the Jews. But this is what he had to say about the Holocaust, and the period of European blindness about the threat posed by fascism which had preceded it: People are surprised, they become indignant.They say:“How strange! But never mind –​it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism.11 “The supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism”: here was a black writer willing to centre his whole understanding of history –​and of the evils of racism –​as much around the experience of the Jews as around the black people of Africa or the Caribbean.12 The second is a black American writer, W.E.B. Du Bois, whose 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk had helped to create the conditions for such later movements of black emancipation as Pan-​Africanism. Fifty years later, by which time Du Bois had also worked with a number of Jewish radicals, and had indeed travelled to post-​war Poland and seen the rubble left by Nazi occupation, he could grasp that parts of his book were marked by passages in which he had referred to Jews as “enterprising” or as “unscrupulous”: I did not, when writing, realise that by stressing the name of the group instead of what some members of the [group] may have done, I was unjustly maligning a people in exactly the same way my folk were then and are now falsely accused.13 That a black radical –​and socialist –​of the stature of DuBois might acknowledge his fault and apologise is a sign of the seriousness with which he took antisemitism. So too does another piece written by DuBois, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”, in which he reflected on the “utter destruction” of the city’s Jewish quarter. That visit, he wrote, did not change his understanding of the Jewish question –​for he had long understood the murderous capacity of antisemitism. Rather it had caused him to reconsider anti-​black racism: The problem of slavery, emancipation and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing ... It was not even a matter of colour and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the colour line had been a real and efficient cause of misery.14 He began to see that racism could draw on different imagined characteristics, could take forms unlike what DuBois himself had experienced,

206  Antisemitism and black emancipation

[T]‌he race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of colour and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.15 The third is the novelist and journalist James Baldwin who in 1948 and 196716 sought to make sense of the New York in which he had grown up and in which many black families had indeed seen their interests as pitted against those of the Jews. In the first, Baldwin tried to show that the roots of that antisemitism was in a complex relationship which began with black Christian fascination with the Jews, and with a knowledge of the long Jewish history of suffering described in the Old Testament. “The hymns, the texts, and the most favoured legends of the devout Negro are all Old Testament and therefore Jewish in origin”. Baldwin’s father had been a preacher. With that childhood in mind, he spoke of a Christian tradition capable of flitting between the pressure of life in Harlem, the conduct of the Italian-​ Ethiopian war, and the story of the Jewish flight from Egypt. “The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses”. Baldwin wrote none of this to excuse such antisemitism but to understand it, and to be more insistent in arguing that Jews were being turned into “symbol” for “hatred”. He warned that there could be no black emancipation through the route of antisemitism.17 In the second article, Baldwin tried to speak to the white authors of the late 1960s, who refused to acknowledge the full extent to which black oppression continued despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Very few Americans, and very few Jews, have the courage to recognize that the America of which they dream, and boast, is not the America in which the Negro lives. It is a country which the Negro has never seen.18 From there, however, he went on to insist –​even more clearly than in his previous piece –​that antisemitism was a form of racism no less brutal than any other. And if it prospered, such prejudice could only end in the suffering of innocents: All racist positions baffle and appal me ... One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads.19 One of the tragedies of Corbynism was that within the left there were people capable of challenging the idea that Jews were simply white, and therefore that the racial interests of Jewish people lay in promoting the interests of white people rather than black. Jews were being essentialised and made into political instruments and treated (in Sai Englert’s phrase) as “the gatekeepers of Western legitimacy at home and

Antisemitism and black emancipation  207

abroad”.20 The left needed to resist that process, and to find people untainted by any association with antisemitism to put that argument clearly. We needed to show that our rejection of that essentialism was rooted in the experience of ordinary Jews, instead of which we found herself having to explain why anyone was still defending the likes of Williamson or Walker or Livingstone. A main barrier to persuading Jews that the Corbyn project was healthy was our own habit of denial. When the left needed to show some interest in dialogue, instead socialists were denouncing complaints of antisemitism as an “assault” and placing behind every accusation the malign influence of “the Israel lobby”.21 “Not all Jews are white”, writes Chanda Prescod-​Weinstein, “not all blacks are gentiles”.22 We should have been pushing forward people who had written sympathetically about both their Jewish and their non-​white ancestry, or whose public utterances looked beyond the immediate conflict between black people or Muslims on one side and Jews on the other. There were people who were capable of playing that role –​such as Jon Lansman, who had managed to consistently maintain their support for Palestinian rights without seeing any need to make an excuse for the people who were indifferent to Jewish opinion. However, the Labour left failed to make them central to the antisemitism crisis. Another was the writer Barnaby Raine who was one of the critics of Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party. He emphasised Corbyn’s long-​held belief in Third World liberation: [Corbyn] learned his radicalism in Jamaica as a young man. He was caught up in a wave of optimism as Michael Manley’s opposition on the island championed workers at home and alliances with Third World radicalism abroad.23 Raine described Corbyn’s immersion in the campaign to defend Salvador Allende’s elected government in Chile. The “universalism” he imbibed there, in Raine’s words, “depicted patriarchy, neo-​colonialism and capital as constricting hierarchies to be swept away by the wretched of the earth”. That explained Corbyn’s identification with the Palestinian struggle. Today, in the last active site of settler-​colonial violence in the world, against a network of checkpoints and blockades the people of Palestine speak to a current that runs through our blood too: the demand that human beings should live in dignity.24 That generous politics of equality, Raine concluded, offered a hand of welcome to British Jews. “Fight racism, fight antisemitism”, Raine concluded, “and as you do, remember the words of the Torah: ‘Justice, justice you shall pursue’ ”.25 Another was the journalist Rachel Shabi, whose families were Jews who had emigrated from Iraq in 1951, and was a journalist for the Guardian, the New

208  Antisemitism and black emancipation

Statesman and Al-​Jazeera, and a supporter of the Corbyn leadership. Shabi was one of the few writers to explain that there were, in 2019, “many British Jews with shades of opinion that don’t fit” either the Labour right’s narrative of Corbyn as an antisemite, or the counter-​narrative that he was in fact the world’s greatest anti-​racist.26 As Shabi explained to Owen Jones, on both sides of the Labour crisis, people were absorbing Jews into whiteness and then treated Arabs and black people as naturally opposed. The reasoning of both left and right was equally to blame: I think it’s a very unsophisticated understanding of how racism works. It relies on creating a racialised minority, and that racialised minority is maybe given temporary whiteness rights. But those rights can be withdrawn again at any point in history.27 Jews had long been perceived as non-​white: having physical characteristics (outsized hair, noses, lips, etc. )28 that marked them as outsiders.29 They were stigmatised as weak, criminal, and dirty and incapable of assimilation.30 A number of Britain’s Jews were from the Middle East. We can show up as white, but we’re Middle Eastern, we’re not white, we “pass” sometimes, depending on the context. That entire population is also erased:Yemeni Jewish people, Iraqi Jews, Moroccan, Tunisian.31 What was needed, in short, was an anti-​racist politics which treated Jews not as the legitimate collateral damage in the more important struggle between whites and blacks or Muslims but was alive to the variety and complexity of Jewish experience.

Notes 1 Z. Strimpel, ‘Black Lives Matter’s Antisemitism Blind Spot,’ Spectator, 1 July 2020; also Z. Strimpel, ‘Why Black Lives Matter Protests Are a Catalyst for Antisemitism,’ Telegraph, 20 June 2020; B. Raine, ‘Long-​Bailey’s Sacking Shows How Antisemitism Has Been Dangerously Redefined,’ Novara, 26 June 2020. For an opposite perspective, defending black politics and its support for Palestinians, A. Olaloku-​Teriba, ‘Political Blackness and Palestinian Solidarity,’ Red Pepper, 22 September 2020. 2 Strimpel, ‘Black Lives Matter’s Antisemitism Blind Spot.’ 3 Strimpel, ‘Black Lives Matter’s Antisemitism Blind Spot.’ 4 P. Berman (ed), Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), p. 70. 5 D. Feldman and B. McGeever, ‘Corbyn’s Labour, British Jews and Antisemitism:Will Peace Now Break Out?’ Haaretz, 6 September 2018. 6 P. Cramer, ‘ “We Stand in Solidarity”: Jewish Organisations Respond to the Protests over George Floyd’s Death,’ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 31 May 2020.

Antisemitism and black emancipation  209

7 P.Weiss, ‘Up to 1 in 4 US Jews Sees Zionism as Racist, Colonialist Apartheid Movement! (Says Right-​Wing Israeli Think-​Tank),’ Mondoweiss, 18 September 2020. Another difference between the US and the UK is the greater willingness in the former country to ask whether a narrative of unbroken Jewish suffering is accurate to Jewish experience or capable of allowing an emotionally satisfying internal life to Jews. D. Durschlag, ‘The Jewish 1%,’ Tablet, 11 September 2019; ‘Danielle Durchslag,’ Judaism Unbound, 25 December 2020; M. Ipp, Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-​Garde (New York: Applied Research Collective for American Jewry, 2019). 8 ‘The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014–​2019,’ Labour Party, March 2020, pp. 42, 43. 9 The Guardian did cover the story, but only to the extent of reporting the unfairness of the messages being released to the public, and not the substantive truth of the allegations that senior Labour figures had used violent and discriminatory language against their factional rivals. J. Elglot and P. Walker, ‘Labour Report Misused Private Messages to Portray Party Members as Racist,’ Guardian, 6 August 2020. 10 The examples given here are indicative and not exhaustive. Other examples would include the Black Panther’s Party 1969 involvement in a “United Front against Fascism”, a move which was intended to involve that group in an alliance with many young left-​wing Jews and did so –​albeit with mixed success. Y. Litvin, ‘The Black Panther Party’s Multiracial Anti-​Fascism,’ ROAR Magazine, 27 August 2020; ‘The Panther Conference: What’s Wrong?’ Independent Socialist, 18 July 1969. Or you could cite Fanon’s description of Blacks and Jews as “brothers in misery”, or his recollection or the idea taught to him by his Philosophy Professor: “Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you”. R. Fine and P. Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 2. 11 A. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 36, 79; M. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 66–​110; A. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 158. 12 M. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 66–​110. 13 M. Richmond, ‘On “Black Antisemitism” and Antiracist Solidarity,’ New Socialist, 26 August 2020. 14 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, pp. 111–​135, 116. 15 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, pp. 111–​135, 116. 16 J. Baldwin, ‘The Harlem Ghetto,’ Commentary, February 1948; J. Baldwin, ‘Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-​White,’ New York Times, 9 April 1967. 17 J. Baldwin, ‘The Harlem Ghetto.’ 18 Baldwin, ‘Negroes.’ 19 Baldwin, ‘Negroes.’ 20 S. Englert,‘Recentring the State: A Response to Barnaby Raine on Antisemitism,’ Salvage, 17 December 2019. 21 Englert, ‘Recentring the State.’ 22 Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism (Chicago: JVP, 2017), p. 32. 23 B. Raine, ‘Why I Stand with Jeremy Corbyn,’ Vashti Media, 31 October 2020. 24 Raine, ‘Why I Stand.’ 25 Raine, ‘Why I Stand.’ 26 R. Shabi, ‘The Treatment of Antisemitism in Our Politics Should Fill Us with Despair,’ Guardian, 26 November 2019.

210  Antisemitism and black emancipation

27 Jones, This Land, p. 217. 28 M. F. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 174. 29 K. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 30 P. Berman (ed), Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), p. 105. 31 Jones, This Land, p. 218.

17 CONCLUSION

I referred in a previous chapter to the many Jews who were socialists at key moments in the history of the left: during the 1890s, the 1920s, and the 1960s. If you were to try to explain Labour’s recent difficulties to members of these previous generations of left-​wing Jews, it would have been obvious to them that in certain respects both sides of Labour’s antisemitism crisis were right. Plainly, in general terms, the supporters of Corbyn were correct: there was a global movement for justice, to which leftists were correct to identify. When they demanded an end to the discriminatory treatment of the Palestinians, their arguments were consistent with greater justice. It was equally plain, however, that with regard to the specific questions raised by the controversy, Corbyn’s critics often had the better of the argument. Countless leftists had made excuses for the likes of Livingstone, Walker, and Mear One. Support for Corbyn changed into a refusal to believe any charge which might be used to undermine him. It led people to an instinct of denying what was obvious. What should Labour have done differently? In 1984, the Manchester-​based solicitor and refugee rights activist Steve Cohen hinted at one potential answer: To struggle as a Jewish socialist, it is a distinct advantage to have been born with three hands –​at least three hands. On the one hand, it is necessary to struggle against the antisemitism of daily life both in its casual and its organised forms.1 But this was only the start of political wisdom: On the other hand, it is necessary to struggle against the reactionary Jewish communal leadership which simultaneously advocates Zionism in Israel and a form of assimilation in the diaspora as the fulfilment of Jewish identity.2

212 Conclusion

And even this was insufficient: On the third hand, it is necessary to resist the antisemitism which has permeated much of the socialist tradition and which was described by August Bebel, German Social Democrat leader, as the “socialism of fools”.3 In 2019, Greg Philo, of Glasgow University’s Media Unit, insisted that the key to surviving the crisis was message discipline: Labour needed to acknowledge where it was in the wrong, be as precise as possible, show all available resources were being devoted to the problem, and show the good faith with which the party was addressing the problem.4 He was not the only person to have reflected on the crisis and thought hard about what Labour could, and should, have done. In summer 2020, Owen Jones wrote that the party needed: A clear strategy adopted earlier [which] would have focussed on dealing with the party’s processes on complaints about antisemitism, combined with speeches and initiatives reaching out to Jewish communities, and the rollout of political education among the membership to deal with conspiracist mentalities.5 This would have been a complex project working through three separate strands: political education, targeted wooing of critics, and disciplinary action. Through this book, I have written as if there were only two tribes within the Labour Party, a left and a right. Within the left there were a few people who grasped the issue and sought to respond to antisemitism on its own terms, placing that beyond their own factional interest. No doubt on the right, the same political intelligence could be found. But even the left and the right were not the totality of Labour tribes. In Francis Beckett and Mark Seddon’s account of Corbyn’s leadership (and of Labour travail’s which preceded it), there is a sustained attempt to understand how it could be that by early 2018, for example, barely one in eight British Jews when polled said that they were intending to vote Labour. “We are talking about a political party here”, they write, “one to which we have dedicated a substantial portion of their lives”. They argue that antisemitism was toxic to Labour in two respects. A party seen as anti-​Jewish could not win elections “because it is not only Jews who are disgusted by antisemitism”. Further, such a party should not win elections. Beckett and Seddon were outside the battles, part of a Labour soft left which had been largely marginalised in 2016–​19, sympathetic to Corbyn’s predicament without being in any way overawed by his supporters. They write, We are in the Labour Party because we believe in equality and fairness. You can’t believe that and be antisemitic, not unless you have the sort of brain that can believe two opposing things at the same time and still function.6

Conclusion  213

John McDonnell, Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor, insists that the main mistake made was a failure to take control of Labour’s administrative machinery and use it, as he and Corbyn were promised, for the speedy investigation of complaints and the exclusion of those found culpable: [I]‌f I’d have known about the lack of implementation [of Chakrabarti] ... the failure to set up a legal panel and the nature of the problem, I’d have made sure that we had proper legal advice; been more ruthless and increased the pace of the process.7 The leadership had been let down, in other words, by the system and the bureaucracy. We took it as read that Chakrabarti was being implemented, because why wouldn’t it be? I’d have erred more on the side of being firmer on some cases...8 Jon Lansman was on Labour’s NEC from 2018. He describes sitting as the decision maker on “hundreds” of cases of members accused of antisemitism. He argues that on Labour’s leading body there was a cross-​party consensus that the process had improved. In individual cases, he argues, the left and right agreed about the action to be taken “98% of the time”.9 He criticises Corbyn’s office for being “entirely concerned with establishing control rather than consensus”. Delays and bad faith prevented the Labour left from winning over those of its critics which had been open to persuasion, “The Jewish Labour Movement were too excluded from decision-​making to play the constructive role they originally tried to play”.10 What could have been done differently? “Jeremy Corbyn should have asked Tom Watson to jointly chair a working group with proper Jewish representation and factional balance to address the problem”.11 Each of the above perspectives has its strengths, but the focus of this book is on a stage before: how any left-​wing tradition prevents itself from falling into the use of antisemitic stereotypes. This could be done only by looking out for that risk. While this book has been written in part from a perspective of trying to explain the law, it is a mistake to think that there is a perfect Labour Party disputes system,12 which, had it been formulated early enough, would have saved that party from the crisis. Anti-​ racism cannot be reducible to “procedure” –​a search, in Michael Richmond’s words, “for legal and bureaucratic fixes to a localized outbreak, so that a never-​clean institution can be given a clean bill of health again”.13 What we need is not a better and ever-​more-​perfect “legal” system to adjudicate disputes, but a shared politics in which people agree that certain behaviours are wrong. The left needed to take seriously the possibility of antisemitism, in a way that neither side of the Labour crisis did, with each tending to satisfy themselves either that party was anti-​racist and therefore immune to it, or that Corbyn was the enemy and that all other forms of antisemitism could be ignored. Blithe on the one hand,

214 Conclusion

self-​righteous on the other; each was more interested in proving their side right than in confronting the problem. There did not exist a perfect set of rules capable of solving everything for Labour, as if the law could carry the burden of solving a political problem. That approach idealised the law, assuming that the more perfectly Labour Party investigations emulated due legal process, the more likely it was that each side would accept each individual result. But no matter how well any investigation might have been conducted, the reality was that neither side was willing to accept the legitimacy of an unwelcome investigation.The Labour left was unable to admit that the real issue was antisemitism; too many people told themselves that in antagonising Jews they were fighting for Palestine. The Labour right could not accept any acquittal but treated it as proof that the greatest contemporary manifestation of antisemitism was a party led by Corbyn, a party so badly run that it was incapable of admitting even plain instances of racist abuse. Labour might well have done better to have introduced the Chakrabarti reforms speedily; but without a wider understanding of the problem and a genuine commitment to addressing it, that reform alone could not have averted the crisis. Such were the volume of complaints by 2018 that any investigation system would have struggled to administer them fairly –​even if every single member of the party’s staff had been temporarily redirected from their existing work in finances or publicity or supporting regional structures and reallocated to dealing with the backlog, there would still have been problems. One of the difficulties was a complete lack of clarity as to how to investigate efficiently and fairly, for Labour made itself not merely the “judge” of the process, but also the “prosecutor” and the “investigating officer”, and once the primary method of investigation had become checking the social media accounts of those accused and with any limitation periods rejected, the volume of work became unmanageable. Thousands were investigated, plenty of them had been on social media four or more hours a day, posting 365 days a year, on their own walls and in groups, often on multiple different platforms. How could any team of investigators search through the accounts of thousands of suspected perpetrators, each of them having made thousands of posts? How could they monitor not just the suspect’s own posts, but even their Facebook “likes”? And how could they do all that, while giving the accused a fair chance to respond? The message of this book is that the initial responsibility to put Labour in order fell to the left, including the non-​Labour left. Long before the crisis made its way into the press, people on the left should have challenged the first signs of antisemitism’s re-​emergence. On social media, people should have criticised posters on groups such as Palestine Live and the Labour Party Forum. They should have done this without favour to the reputation of anyone involved. Life would have been so much easier if, for example, in 2012, when Corbyn expressed his initial cautious and questioning support for Mear One, his left-​wing admirers had challenged him. Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, and Chris Williamson were rightly rebuked. And this should not have been left to the disciplinary bodies of the Labour Party, for

Conclusion  215

whom the principal focus is always going to be the bureaucrat’s question: do you suspend, expel, or leave someone in membership?14 For, as this book has argued, even the question of who gets to be a member of the Labour Party, or a Labour MP, is subordinate to the more pressing issue of how we challenge discrimination. Shunning is no answer. Challenge where you can, expel if you must. But, even if someone’s membership is taken away from them, their friends should still be talking to them afterwards and trying to explain where they went wrong. The key to getting the issue right is not to be found in the perpetual redrafting of a set of party rules, important though these are, they cannot substitute for the shared political understanding which is the best protection against a problem recurring. Through this book, I have criticised Corbyn’s critics on the right for their weakness in face of antisemitism supported by the United States, for their inability to confront new patterns of racism where those have been turned against Jews, and for their support of the Israeli government and its Eastern European allies. But at certain key points, they had a clearer insight than Corbyn’s critics into what needed doing. We can recall what Ephraim Mirvis wrote in 2019: The party leadership have never understood that their failure is not just one of procedure, which can be remedied with additional staff or new processes. It is a failure to see this as a human problem rather than a political one.15 Passages of this book have been critical of Mirvis but on that last point, he was right. A party might have on paper the best of all imaginable rules, but if its disciplinary structures are riven by factionalism they cannot work. Without a shared willingness to acknowledge the capacity for antisemitism to return, under any set of rules, the behaviour would have continued. The left made so many mistakes; we admitted so few of them. Even if factionalism explained some of why Labour had been so slow to deal with the crisis, it could not explain the most basic problem, which is why individuals of the prominence of Walker, Livingstone, and Williamson were caught up in this row at all? At a certain point, the Labour left needs to accept –​though it still has not –​our culpability and taken ownership of it. A better approach would have been to go into the crisis looking for allies, rather than people, to disagree with. Had the Labour left stopped denouncing Jews, had we listened more attentively, had we stopped treating British Jewish opinion as hopelessly implicated in the maintenance of the status quo, including in the Middle East, then –​then, who knows? –​it is possible that we might have seen a greater range of reactions than we did under Corbyn. There is a line in one of Philip Roth books which goes, “I’m never more of a Jew than I am in a church when the organ begins”,16 to which we might add, or when the chair of Wavertree CLP appears on the Richie Allen show, or when Ken Livingstone speaks. Had the left courted Jewish opinion, without giving up our support for Palestine, we might have found people willing to endorse Labour’s policies on housing or

216 Conclusion

on secure employment or on student debt, even if they did not agree with the left on the Middle East. For alongside Corbyn’s opposition to wars, and empathy with the oppressed in Britain and abroad, part of the reason for his success was under his leadership Labour spoke to the situation of millions of young people –​those with recent experience of education, those in debt, people who rented their own homes. And these were experiences shared by non-​Jews as much as anyone else. Had the left stopped making assumptions about Jews we might even have noticed that between the two poles of Jewish opinion, the JLM and JVL, there were a range of people open to giving Corbyn a chance, if only we could listen to them. The way to prevent a further round of antisemitism from ever again taking root in the Labour Party begins with the acknowledgment that “evil is not the prerogative of others”,17 and that, potentially, anyone can slip into habits of stereotyping. You begin to confront antisemitism by looking for it. When you find it, you need to challenge it –​however close it is at hand. In the Preface to this book, I spoke of the mistake both sides of the crisis made in determining to fight politics through procedure. This choice did not shield Corbyn’s supporters: the structures Labour had chosen were shown by the EHRC to be arbitrary, chaotic, and inadequate. But nor did it deliver the right what they wanted, a clear finding that Labour had been institutionally racist. Each side saw the law not as a process but as an outcome. Each was uninterested in the parts of the law which might have been of any use for identifying antisemitism (e.g., our long-​established concepts for identifying racist behaviour). Each wanted the paternal approval of a legal vindication without the hard graft of persuading racists to change. Merely causing offence, I have seen it often said, is not necessarily racism. That is true, but as a discrimination lawyer I know it is insufficient. For as this book has explained, at the heart of our legal concept of racial harassment is an idea of causing a humiliating environment for another person. Our main shield for those accused of that wrongdoing is that the behaviour must be of certain significance: a person who was looking to be offended is not protected by the law. But before the act of causing harassment on racial grounds, there must exist a prior and more widespread mental state –​a willingness to antagonise. We live in an epoch where much politics takes place on social media, and where insults are pervasive and stick around. In that context, it seems to me that very large numbers of people on the left have shown the wrong attitude. The alternative to causing reckless offence is not to dilute your politics but to think about how you express them. It is to talk to the people you disagree with, not in a spirit of score-​settling, but from the hope that you might change their mind. Indeed, isn’t that the precondition of an open conversation, that they might change their mind –​and you might change yours? That means giving up on trolling, scorn, and all the other distinctive habits of online discourse and listening to people who disagree with you. If you are in a situation of genuine physical risk (if you are the person sitting in the streets in front of a bulldozer) then perhaps cruel words are justified –​what, indeed, do the victims of that situation have left to them, other than

Conclusion  217

words? But most of us are not, rather we sit at our desks, shouting into the void and making excuses for ourselves when we do. I am a part of the left and it is a part of me. I want the social wage to be higher, and the conditions of workers and tenants to be protected. I do not believe that this can take place only through government –​it will have to begin with social movements, with people in their communities and in workplaces taking power into their own hands –​but a left-​wing government might help. I do not believe that the present leadership of the Labour Party has the radical instinct to contribute to that change. Nor do I accept the terms which the Labour right offers to activists such as me, that we should lower our hopes to the point at which Labour and Conservative are almost indistinguishable as the price for ever securing a Labour election victory. I would like to see the leadership of the Labour Party again in the control not of social democrats but of socialists, and if that proves to be unachievable, I would like to see socialists organising independently and winning a mass audience for radical politics. I believe that this is most likely to happen if the left renews itself, taking much of the threat posed by antisemitism just as seriously as it deserves, and if each of us learns to take responsibility for the people around us.

Notes 1 S. Cohen, That’s Funny: You Don’t Look Antisemitic (Manchester: Beyond the Pale Collective, 1984), p. 1. 2 Cohen, That’s Funny, p. 1. 3 Cohen, That’s Funny, p. 1. 4 G. Philo, M. Berry, J. Schlosberg,A. Lerman, and D. Miller , Bad News for Labour:Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief (London: Pluto, 2019), p. 22. 5 Jones, This Land, p. 314. 6 F. Beckett and M. Seddon, Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England (London: Biteback, 2018), p. 271. 7 Philo, Berry, Schlosberg, Lerman, and Miller, Bad News, p. 157. 8 Philo, Berry, Schlosberg, Lerman, and Miller, Bad News, p. 157. 9 Email from Jon Lansman to author, 4 January 2021. 10 Email from Jon Lansman. 11 Email from Jon Lansman. 12 M. Richmond, ‘On “Black Antisemitism” and Antiracist Solidarity,’ New Socialist, 26 August 2020. 13 M. Richmond, ‘Anti-​Racism as Procedure,’ Protocols, 15 December 2020. 14 B. Klug, ‘How Not to Tackle Antisemitism on the Left,’ Vashti Media, 17 August 2020. 15 R. Mason, ‘Labour Has Let Poison of Antisemitism Take Root, Says Chief Rabbi,’ Guardian, 26 November 2019. 16 A. Marantz, Antisocial: How Online Extremists Broke America (London: Picador, 2020 edn), p. 240. 17 M. Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst (London: Saqi, 2009), p. 26.

INDEX

Abbott, Diane 157, 162, 204 Achcar, Gilbert 54 Alderman, Geoffrey 162 Allen, Richie 137–​8, 215 Anderson, Lee 4 Arendt, Hannah 52, 60, 142, 144, 173, 199, 200 Arkush, Jonathan 107, 163 Atzmon, Gilad 117, 137, 159–​60, 185 Auschwitz 37 Avnery, Uri 163 Baddiel, David 54, 108 Baldwin, James 206 Balfour, Arthur 98, 123 Barghouti, Mourid 36, 49 Beckett, Francis 4, 32, 212 Beeley,Vanessa 159–​60 Berger, Luciana 132–​9, 141, 186, 191, 197 Bird, Jo 66 Board of Deputies of British Jews 4, 9, 25, 32, 40, 85, 91, 107, 123, 158, 163, 177, 187 Braverman, Suella 4 Breivik, Anders 4 Brown, Rivkah 85 Butler, James 184 Butler, Judith 25 Campaign Against Antisemitism 187 Canary 56, 161, 184, 186 Chabloz, Alison 138

Chakrabarti, Shami 90–​2, 125, 127, 191, 213–​4 Cohen, Steve 211 Collett, Mark 3, 138 Community Security Trust 9, 45, 126, 187 Cultural Marxism (conspiracy theory) 4 Cummings, Dominic 3, 80 Daily Stormer 132 Darwish, Mahmoud 18 Davies, William 51 Downing, Gerry 117 Dysch, Marcus 96 Eisner, Kurt 2 Electronic Intifada 56, 98–​100, 161, 163 Englert, Sai 206 Equality and Human Rights Commission vii, ix, 62, 118, 187–​92, 216 Evans, Richard 7 Evolve Politics 97 Facebook 4, 34, 65–​7, 96, 106, 112, 117, 122, 133, 135, 150 Farage, Nigel 2, 85–​6, 111 Feldman, David 28, 199, 203 Formby, Jennie 125 Fraser v UCU 27 Freedland, Jonathan 150–​1 Ghalayini, Basma 36 Gidley, Ben 28 Goodall, Lewis 182

Index  219

Grossman, David 175 Guinan, Joe 183 Haavara agreement 53–​4, 59 Harris, John 141–​2 Hart, Sally–​Ann 3–​4, 80, 177 Herzl, Theodor 52, 142 Hirsh, David 19, 30, 37, 82 Hodge, Margaret 133, 186, 198–​9 Hoffman, Abbie 123 Icke, David 98, 137, 143, 184 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance 18–​25, 86, 122 Irving, David 7 Jeremy for Leader 32 Jewdas 103–​11, 125 Jewish Chronicle 3–​4, 33, 86, 95–​6, 107–​9, 111, 124, 137, 153, 162, 164, 172 Jewish Labour Movement 25, 71, 93, 96, 103, 112, 123, 152, 184, 187, 213, 216 Jewish Voice for Labour viii, 40, 56, 8, 69, 71, 98, 100, 103–​6, 114, 123, 126, 129, 161, 165, 170, 185, 192, 216 Johnson, Alan 32, 126 Johnson, Boris 3, 6–​7 Jones, Owen 57, 71, 104, 185, 208, 212 Kahn–​Harris, Keith 9 “Kapo”, insult 72, 123–​5 Keable, Stan 114–​5, 121 Klug, Brian 30, 123 Lansman, Jon 33, 55–​6, 65, 104–​5, 136, 184–​6, 207, 213 Lavin, Talia 78 Lentin, Alana 137 Lerman, Tony 188 Lipman, Maureen 10 Litten, Hans 72 Livingstone, Ken 34, 45–​62, 64, 68, 103, 106, 108, 114, 128, 135, 156, 185–​6, 188, 190–​1, 207, 211, 214–​5 Loach, Ken 64, 94–​5 Macpherson report 26 Manson, Jenny 58 Marqusee, Mike 158 Massad, Joseph 113 McDonnell, John 34, 55, 125, 213 McGeever, Brendan 28, 195, 203 Mear One 5, 90–​102, 114–​5, 133–​4, 143–​5, 214

Middle East Forum 176 Miliband, Ed 10, 157 Milne, Seumas 126–​9 Mirvis, Chief Rabbi Ephraim 6–​9, 84, 91, 215 Momentum 32–​3, 55–​6, 63–​5, 71, 104–​5, 136, 150, 183–​5 Monbiot, George 157–​8 Morris, Benny 43 Murray, Andrew 196 Murray, Laura 96–​7 Nandy, Lisa 152 Neslen, Diana 122 Netanyahu, Benjamin 122, 171–​8 Neuberger, Baroness 129, 174 Nicholls, Charlotte 108–​9 Nordau, Max 38 Orbán,Viktor 150, 171, 173, 176–​7 Panorama 125–​9 Pappé, Ilan 41, 43 Peled, Miko 93–​5 Philo, Greg 212 Philosemitism on left 196–​7 Philosemitism on right 80–​3, 122 Pollard, Stephen 3, 86, 95, 107, 111, 153, 172 Raine, Barnaby 117–​8, 207 Rees–​Mogg, Jacob 2–​3, 80, 111, 177 Rich, Dave 126 Richmond, Michael 213 Robinson, Tommy 172–​3, 175–​6 Rosen, Michael 8, 124–​5 Rosenberg, David 129, 170–​1 Roth, Philip 215 Royall, Baroness 32, 90 Said, Edward 41, 44, 49, 99 Salah, Raed 32, 164–​6 Schneider, David 108 Seddon, Mark 4, 32, 212 Segalov, Michael 99 Seymour, Richard 57, 92–​3, 99, 165, 185 Shabi, Rachel 192, 207–​8 Shah, Naz 32–​49, 51, 188, 191 Sherwood, Marika 30 Sivier, Mike 137 Skwawkbox 56, 97, 134, 136, 184, 186 Slave Trade 5, 40, 63–​76, 95–​6, 156, 161, 205

220 Index

Smeeth, Ruth 92–​3, 118, 134 Socialist Fight 116–​7 Solley, Stephen 122 Soros, George 3–​4, 78, 80, 86, 111, 124–​5, 138, 171–​2, 176–​7 Starmer, Keir 183, 187, 194, 202 Stern, Kenneth 19–​20, 86–​7, 112 Stern–​Weiner, Jamie 57–​8, 71, 93 Sternhell, Zeev 142–​3, 145, 173–​4 Stop the War Coalition 157–​9 Streeting, Wes 152–​3 Trump, Donald 10, 77–​89, 99, 116, 132, 146, 148, 150, 172–​3, 177, 181, 203

Twitter 7, 54, 57, 65, 72, 77, 83, 85–​6, 97, 99, 105, 106, 112, 114, 117, 121, 124, 135, 137, 150, 153, 159–​60 Vashti Media 85 Vox Political 40, 56, 137, 165 Walker, Jackie 63–​77, 103, 127–​8, 136, 156, 185–​7, 207, 211 Walker, Michael 184 Williamson, Chris 56, 103, 156–​157, 160–​1, 185, 190, 207, 214 World Conference Against Racism 19 Yacahd 33