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Showing posts with label Zionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zionism. Show all posts
Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ On 7th October 2023 the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, crossed the border into Israel with relative ease. 

The Israeli authorities, including the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were apparently caught asleep when the incursion took place. How could this have been? The Israelis have one of the highest technologically advanced defence systems in the world so how could a group like Hamas carry out such an audacious raid? One news bulletin, very, very briefly explained why this breach in Israel's security may have happened. It was only shown once and has not been seen again on TV. Apparently, many of the IDF troops assigned to defend the border had taken time out to go hunting ‘Palestinians with Israeli settlers’ -  Israeli settlers who are illegally occupying Palestinian land supposedly protected under so-called ‘international law’. These settlers are comfortably housed and living on land they have no right to be on. Not content with stealing this territory, every now and again these illegal squatters go looking for Palestinians - unarmed Palestinians - often accompanied by members of the IDF. This was the reason, according to this brief news bulletin, why the border was left with a skeletal protection, the troops were out on a ‘turkey shoot’ with the illegal settlers. Putting this on the news was an obvious mistake as the last thing the Western authorities want is their peoples to know the truth about what is happening in Israel/Palestine. The caption was not shown again.

My own view of Hamas, unlike some other Palestinian fighting groups, is they are a bunch of religious nutters, like their nemesis in Israel the Zionists. Like their paymasters in Iran who torture and kill women who do not conform to some barmy Muslim religious law, which perhaps does not exist outside their interpretation of the Koran, and such tortures and murders happen all too often in Iran. Hamas appear to share a similar set of beliefs. Hamas are anti-women’s rights, anti-LGBTQ and certainly will not bring freedom to the Palestinian people. The Zionist crowd in Tel Aviv who constitute the Israeli Government are no better in their fanatical beliefs in Judea and hatred of Arabs. Don’t get me wrong, it is everybody’s right to practice their religion, or to follow none, but not if that leads to fanaticism, murder and war.

When Hamas crossed into Israel, something which the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip for many decades all too often killing unarmed Palestinians, they had the chance to take the moral high ground, but did not take this opportunity. Had Hamas a military brain between them they would have taken a golden opportunity to score a military victory over the IDF and score points in the propaganda war. They did not do this. One option may have been, cross the border as they did, then double back on themselves and take the IDF border guards, reduced in number as they must have known, from the Israeli side. They could have stolen their uniforms and weapons and waited for those guards, out on a ‘turkey shoot’ with the settlers, to return and take them as well using the art of surprise. They could then return to Gaza better armed and with IDF uniforms and issue a statement along the lines of, perhaps:

acting on intelligence received from inside the IDF Hamas ASUs (Active Service Units) penetrated Israeli security attacking and killing a number of IDF border guards. We have the ability and expertise to hit when and how we please as this operation bears testament.

Such a statement would have caused panic and confusion inside the IDF and the Zionist Government in Tel Aviv. There were other equally legitimate alternatives for them to hit. They did not do this and instead took civilian hostages whose only crimes were listening to music or being Jewish. Hamas is not a military outfit, moreover it is a bunch of religious rabble!! The Israelis have for many, many, years been murdering Palestinian civilians and Hamas had the opportunity to rise above this barbarism of their foes. They should have confined their operations to attacking and destroying military, political and economic targets. Instead, they took civilians, women and children, concert goers as hostages and nobody, outside Hamas, knows what fate awaits them! 

Hamas could have gained much credibility in the eyes of normal people, among which I do not include western governments, by carrying out a well-planned military assault on Israel in their pursuit of a Palestinian nation-state. Hamas want to see the total destruction of Israel, something which will not happen and should not be allowed to happen. The destruction of the apartheid Zionist state yes, definitely, but the destruction of Israel as a country, no equally definitely not! After all, when the Third Reich was thankfully defeated in 1945 we witnessed the destruction of the evil Nazi state, but not the obliteration of Germany off the map, so where’s the difference? A smaller and reformed Israel and her population of 9.5 million, slightly larger than Greater London, living in peace alongside a Palestinian nation state is not an unreasonable starting point and aim. There would be no room for the Zionist fanatics or Hamas under such an arrangement.

The response by the Israelis to the Hamas attack has been devastating and murderous. They have turned Gaza, which has been an open-aired prison for the Palestinian inmates for years, into something between the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jewish people were forced to live by the Nazis and subsequently destroyed by them with the inhabitants still in their dwellings following an ‘uprising’ and the Sobibor Nazi Death Camp. If the Hamas attack was a war crime, which it was once they took hostages, then the reaction by Israel is ten war crimes! However, a war crime is a war crime be it one or a hundred. The death and destruction Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza has been done under the aegis of ‘Israels right to defend herself’ which is stretching this right to say the least. Does this ‘right to defend herself’ stretch as far as cutting off electricity supplies to civilians? Does it go so far as to legitimise preventing hospitals from treating patients, some in critical conditions? Does it stretch to stopping emergency medical supplies to hospitals? The answer to these questions is categorically No. What the Israelis are doing constitutes war crimes of the first degree and the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv just like some of the Nazis nearly eighty years ago should be held to account. Oddly enough it was the USA who gave protection and immunity to some Nazis who were of use to them!!

Could the Israeli Intelligence Services have been behind the Hamas attack? Could Mossad have planned the attack on Israeli civilians? No, this is unlikely but what is possible is they allowed the attacks to go ahead. The reason for this, if it was the case and it’s only a remote possibility, could have been to create a situation which, under the guise of ‘Israel defending itself’ which allows them to bomb and bulldoze Gaza to pulp? Could this have happened? Unlikely but certainly not beyond the bounds of possibilities. In the eyes of the world Israel would be exercising her ‘right to defend herself’ which is what has happened as government after government repeatedly speak of this right of ‘Israel to defend itself’. From Washington to London to Dublin, in fact across the western world, we have repeatedly heard this bland, less than convincing rhetoric about Israels ‘right the defend herself’ and it is wearing very thin! In the Dail, 12th October 2023, Holly Cairns, the leader of the Social Democrats asked Tanaiste, Micheal Martin, “why had the European Union not shown the same condemnation of Israeli attacks on Gaza civilians as they have to Hamas for their attacks?” Martin replied with some half-baked answer, which was no answer at all really, about the EU continuing financial support for the people of Gaza. Also in the Dail, People Before Profit TD, Richard Boyd Barret, was almost foaming at the mouth in his condemnation of Israel. As the veins stuck out on his neck he, rightly, condemned the IDF and Netanyahu Government demanding the 26 county administration support the Palestinians. What a great pity he, and his parent party the Socialist Workers Party, did not show the same outrage against British atrocities in the six counties! 

In Britain at the Labour Party Conference leader Keir Starmer said “I am shocked and appalled by events in Israel and these attacks by Hamas must be condemned”. Not a word, notably, of condemnation for the disproportionate response from Tel Aviv! At a press conference in Tel Aviv while shaking hands with war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, told the Israeli leader; “America will always be at Israel's side”. He went on to liken the Hamas attacks with “echoes of Nazi massacres”. If any side, without condoning Hamas for one second, is emulating the actions of the Third Reich against Jewish people, it is the Israelis actions against Palestinian civilians. So much for so-called ‘international law’ which, arguably, does not exist!! If a country is well in with the USA, as Israel is, they are free to break any law they wish with, it appears, US permission.

To have a law, any law, it must be enforced. This often quoted ‘international law’ is unenforceable as those unofficially charged with enforcing it, the USA, NATO, Russia, Britian and China regularly break such laws. I remember many years ago in West Belfast on the toilet door of a pub was written, ‘when the people who make the law, break the law, in the name of the law then there is no law’. A fitting piece of wall graffiti which also applies to this ‘international law’. Blinken by stating “America will always be at Israel's side” was giving approval to go out and commit war crimes to Netanyahu, of that there can be no doubt. According to Gabrielle Aumann, Medicines Sans Frontier, the war crimes committed include; “hospitals attacked by Israeli forces”. He continued; “We are running out of supplies and electricity. Babies in units will die if the electricity runs out. The Israelis are violating humanitarian law” he said.

The advice Hamas are giving to people, people in a position of hopelessness, is to ignore the Israeli warnings about leaving Gaza. As bombs explode all around them Hamas can offer nothing more concrete than this rubbish? How can a person ignore something which is happening before their very eyes? Are Hamas totally bereft of any form of reality? War crimes are going on in Palestine and have been for decades, people are being murdered by the thousand daily and all Hamas can say is, “ignore anything Israel say and stay where you are”. On this occasion Hamas, through their actions in the attack on Israel, have exposed the legitimate Palestinian struggle to the same allegations of war crimes as those levelled at the Israelis! Are they simply plain stupid, or just barbaric as are, it has appeared for many years, the Israeli Government? One thing Hamas and the Zionists share, they are both fucking evil, rotten to the core.

A war crime, according to the Geneva Convention 1949, is a violation “of the laws of war that give rise to individual criminal responsibility for action by combatants in action such as intentionally killing civilians”. War Crimes cover “murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave labour or any other of the civilian population in the occupied territory, killing of hostages, torture or inhuman treatment.” Both the Hamas and the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv are guilty of many of these offences and should be tried for such crimes. 

An addition in 1977 to the Geneva Convention of 1949 was an amendment which detailed ‘international humanitarian law’ which, notably Israel are not signatories to as neither, are the USA the country along with the British Government giving the most unequivocal support to the Zionist breach of international law! Clearly both Hamas and the Israeli Government are guilty of breaking ‘international law’ but it looks likely only Hamas will pay the penalty. The United States will continue to stand beside the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv as will, no doubt, the British Government and the European Union. Basically, what is happening is that a cloak of protection is being given to Netanyahu and his government misinterpreting ‘Israels right to defend itself’ with ‘Israels right to commit war crimes’.

The situation in the region is affecting many walks of life not least sport. In Britain on Monday 9th October Arab and Muslim sportsmen in Cricket, Football and Rugby held a meeting. At this meeting it was decided if the Wembley Arch was illuminated in Israeli flag colours before or during the friendly football match between England and Australia on Friday 13th October at Wembley these sports competitors stated “they would walk off the pitch if respect was not shown to the Palestinians lost in the conflict.” Earlier Jewish supporters of all three games had condemned the sporting authorities for “staying quiet” about what they described as; “the worst atrocity since the holocaust”. The Wembley authorities decided against lighting up the arch much to the annoyance of the British Government and the Israeli Football Association. The Irish Dailly Mirror on Saturday 14th October reported; “Rabbi quits in FA refusal”. This was in reference to “the Chair of the Faith in Football group” resigning over the FA's refusal to illuminate Wembley in the Israeli flag colours. “Rabbi Alex Goldberg has told the FA that Faith in Football will no longer be working with them”. This group appear to be a religious faction, which is their right, which refuse to see the crimes of both Hamas and the Israeli defence forces. The IDF have committed by far the most war crimes which ‘Faith in Football’ conveniently do not mention. Equally, “two wrongs do not make a right”, for once I have semi-agreement with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

All the warring factions which are murdering civilians in the area should be taken off the stage. Starting with the Netanyahu Government in Tel Aviv, Hamas and any other faction who are a barrier to peace should be taken out of the game. The demand Israel should be wiped off the map must be dropped. The Zionist state which exists at the moment should be forced out and a new, reformed and smaller and democratic Israel put in its place. The other idea, perhaps applicable in any other situation, but not this one due to historical factors, is a non-starter. That is, Israel goes and a unified Palestine be born where ‘Jews can live’. Given the historical experiences of the Jewish people dating back to the 12th century and before, why should these people have any faith or confidence in such an arrangement? Did they not consider themselves safe in Russia before the ‘Pale of Settlement’? Equally, did the Jewish community not feel safe in Germany until Hitler came to power? The answer to both these is yes they did feel safe and look what happened. Why then should they feel safe in the proposed new Palestine where ‘Jewish people can live’? I know I wouldn’t if I was Jewish, would you?

The victims in this almighty murderous mess, the Israeli hostages whose fate is unknown to all but Hamas, and the Palestinian people of Gaza who are being bombed out of existence are the real sufferers. The Palestinians are being pulled in a three way-no-win situation. On the one hand, Egypt is refusing, so far, to open the ‘Rafah Pass’ which is the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Therefore, the Palestinians cannot cross into Egypt. On the other, Israel is not allowing aide to cross their border into Gaza because if they do, the bombing and killing of Palestinians would have to stop for fear of bombing the aide convoys. In the centre Hamas are telling the Palestinian people of Gaza to “ignore the Israeli warnings to move south, and stay where they are”, three not very appetising choices. Cold blooded murder by all concerned with one side, the Zionists, backed all the way by the USA and the West. What fucking hope for the Palestinian refugees?

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Hamas And Zionists Destroy Any Hope Of Peace In The Region


Harry Saul Markham, a student in London and the director of a Jewish educational movement, writes in Israel Hayom ➤ Anyone that suggests the Palestinians will erase these memories or feelings for this land through a change in leadership or for political expediency, simply does not understand the Palestinian narrative.

A Jewish state based on universal suffrage and the protection of rights and liberties for all has flourished for over 72 years. For those of us that campaign for Israel, the line "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" has been our trump card. Israel is certainly the oasis of democracy in a neighborhood of autocratic and police states. Although for many, the future of a democratic and Jewish state is in peril. This is certainly the view of one of the world's largest liberal Zionist organizations, J Street ...

I would agree that the democratic future of the Jewish state is in real danger. And although I am in favor of maintaining the status quo for as long as possible, I do not believe it will be eternally sustainable, and one day, therefore, there will need to be a permanent solution to this conflict.

However, I do not believe the proposed two-state solution is the answer.  

Continue reading @ Israel Hayom.

The Democratic Crisis Of Zionism

Barry Gilheany with the third in a series of articles on anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism.

Antisemitism: An Essentially Contested Concept? 

Anti-Semitism is objective, and is external to the subjective feelings of individuals. This means that in order to clarify the issues involved in debates around the definition of the concept, it is essential to examine how the concept is actualised in the social world in addition to the ways in which the processes of definition are played out there. What counts as a case of racism is a matter of dispute. It is the nature of these debates with all the visceral emotions they engender and the political implications and consequences that flow from them that makes clarity over the definitions of what we disagree essential (Hirsh: pp.137-38).

Antisemitism has a shape shifting, amoebic quality. Deborah Lipstadt cites the definition of anti-Semitism by the historical sociologist Helen Fine as constituting:

A persisting latent structure of hostile beliefs towards Jews as a collectivity manifested in individuals as attitudes, and in culture as myth, ideology, folklore and imagery, and in actions – social or legal discrimination, political mobilisation against Jews, and collective or state violence – which results in and/or is designed to distance, displace or destroy Jews as Jews. (Lipstadt: p.17)

This “structure” suggests an internal coherence to anti-Semitism; a coherence which did not exist for John-Paul Sartre who saw anti-Semitism as a “passion” which because it made no intellectual sense should not be dignified by the appellation of an “idea”. Likewise, Anthony Julius who, while fully recognising the historical lineage of Jew hatred, contends that antisemitism must ultimately be seen as a "discontinuous, contingent aspect of a number of distinct mentalities and milieus.” He goes on to say that antisemitism “is a heterogenous phenomenon, the site of collective hatreds, and of cultural anxieties and resentments." (Lipstadt: p.20).

It is fair to say though that most scholars, writers and activists in the sphere do recognise some degree of consistency and unity in the variegated forms of anti-Semitism that have persisted down the last two millennia. The conundrum is to find a definition that has dear as possible universal acceptance and applicability. A quest for such an automatic and uncontested formula which can instantly tell us what is and what isn’t anti-Semitic is, in the words of Hirsh ‘not going to be successful’ (Hirsh, p.139).

However, the possibility of ultimate futility of trying to find a Grand Theory of Everything type explanation of anti-Semitism does not nullify the importance of identifying, at any rate, institutional forms of anti-Semitism. Understanding whether a comment or institution is racist/sexist/disabilist or embodies any other prejudice requires a close study of and an understanding of context, of tropes and of the histories of the form of bigotry or prejudice in question. It requires consideration of intentions and discursive practices, of norms and methods of exclusion, of modes of denial. The recognition of anti-Semitism requires similar epistemological and archaeological effort (Hirsh: p.139). 

Zionism and Antizionism 

Here I discuss how antizionism, although conceptually different from intrinsic hostility towards Jews as a people and Judaism, has segued into a modern form of antisemitism.

The most essential elements of left anti-Semitism concern its interrelationship with anti-Zionism and is germane to the Labour Party’s institutional crisis. Zionism or specifically political Zionism was, in the view of its advocates historically’ the belief in establishing a Jewish state in the historic homeland known as Israel’ [1]. Its founding father was Theodore Herzl who formulated the doctrine in 1897 as a reaction to a period of intense anti-Semitism in Europe characterised by pograms in Russia and Eastern Europe and symbolised by the notorious trial in France of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew and army captain who was accused of selling secrets to the German Empire and which led to anti-Semitism becoming rife throughout France. Herzl laid out his idea for a Jewish homeland which he saw as the only means of guaranteeing the safety of the Jewish people in the pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. In it, he proclaimed that in a Jewish state “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our homes peacefully die”. In light of modern academic and political controversies over the intended scope of Zionist expansionism, Zionism crucially never specified how much of the historic land of Palestine/Israel was to become the Jewish state, just that a Jewish state should be re-established in the Middle East.[2]

It is axiomatic to Zionist supporters therefore that anti-Zionism equates to anti-Semitism. With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, anti-Zionism changed from abstract opposition to the idea of a non-existent Jewish state into opposing ‘the existence of a country with actually existing, living, breathing inhabitants’.[3] In this account anti-Zionism in a mutation of anti-Semitism which updates traditional anti-Semitic tropes first propagated and them spread aggressively later by the Soviet Union[4]. It singles out Jewish people as some kind of anomalous group to be deprived of rights to national or regional autonomy that groups all round the world possess or aspire to possess. It also seeks to deprive Jews of their cultural and ethnic history, as it rejects their claim to be a people indigenous to the land of Israel/Palestine. Anti-Zionists describe Israel as a White European colonialist venture and frame it in the wider context of imperialism. Zionists retort by asking how can an ethnic group colonise its own historic land that it was exiled from through ethnic cleansing and genocide?[5].

Others such as Peter Beinart caution against the conflation of anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred.[6] He tries to deconstruct the three pillars on which this equation is founded as follows.

The first is the national self-determination argument; that opposing Zionism is anti-Semitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoy: a state of its own. Beinart points to the “dozens” of other stateless nationalities such as Kurds, Basques, Tibetans, Scots and Quebecois and asserts that:

barely anyone opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot in order to bolster his argument that it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than ethnic nationalism built around heritage.[7] 

Many would argue that this statement betrays an astonishing ignorance of the experiences of the oppression of national minorities by centralising states such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Turkey, China, Franco’s Spain, Modi’s India and the Iran of the mullahs in which particular ethnic and tribal groups historically held sway.

Beinart also uses arguments for civic as opposed to ethnic nationalism to critique the second pillar of the anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism synonym: that in the words of the New York Times columnist Brett Stephens that “… Antizionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it”. While abjuring descriptions of Israel as “an apartheid state”, Beinart argues that for most of Israel’s Arab citizens (as well as for the larger Palestinian Arab diaspora) Zionism represents a form of political dispossession in that the State of Israel privileges Jewish immigration but denies the Right to Return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants[8] in order to preserve Israel as a Jewish-majority entity and that the steadily rightward direction of travel taken by the Netanyahu government as symbolised by the Nation-State Law indicates an increasingly cold house for Israel’s Arab population (to say nothing of the situation of the Palestinian Arab residents on the West Bank). But it is also important to point out that many Zionists advocate a two-state solution; that to ensure peace in the region ‘a strong and secure Palestinian state’ must ‘exist alongside a peaceful and secure Israeli state.[9] Beinart also advocates that the West Bank and Gaza become a Palestinian state alongside a ‘more inclusive’ Israel which should ‘remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews’.[10]

The third element of the equation between antizionism and antisemitism which Beinart seeks to disprove is the practical argument that the two animosities simply go together. He points to the affinity between Netanyahu and far right European leaders such as Victor Orban, Heinz-Christian Strache of the Austrian Freedom Party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany who traffic blatantly in anti-Semitism while publicly championing Zionism too as well as the Christian anti-Semitic Zionism of US evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.[11] However anti-Zionism is still a staple of anti-Semitic racists such as David Duke, Nick Griffin and Louis Farrakhan which underlines the contention that anti-Zionism is a modern variant of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Zionist Discourse

Hirsh frames the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as follows. He uses the term ‘anti-Zionism’ as a descriptor for the multiplicity of ‘movements which coalesce’ not around opposition to Israeli policy or racist movements within Israel ‘but rather around a common orientation to the existence or legitimacy of the State of Israel itself' (Hirsh: p.184) He hypothesises that anti-Semitism is the consequence, intentional or otherwise, of anti-Zionism. For ‘although hostility to the idea, existence and policies of Israel comes from a variety of sources, and is not the same as hostility to Jews’; certain ‘manifestations of this hostility can nevertheless’ produce ‘a politics’ and aggregate ‘of practices which create a common-sense of Israel as a unique evil in the world’. They therefore can set the scene for confrontation with Jews – ‘those Jews, anyway, who prefer not to disavow Israel by defining themselves as anti-Zionist (Hirsh: p.185).

As stated above post-1948 antizionism is not a single, unitary movement but an assortment of differing strands. In the Middle East, both secular and Islamist anti-Zionist traditions have always been hostile to Jewish immigration into Palestine and the continued existence of the State of Israel; in the former Soviet bloc there was a Stalinist anti-Zionism (of which more later); right-wing and neo-Nazi anti-Semitism increasingly articulates hostility to Jews in anti-Zionist rhetoric (e.g. David Duke, David Irving and Nick Griffin) and there is also a contemporary current of anti-Zionism which openly toys with anti-Semitic rhetoric and which does not easily fall on a left-right polarity as exemplified by artists such as the jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. (Hirsh: pp.186-87).

The ‘Zionism’ of the anti-Zionists is a totalitarian movement which is equivalent to racism, Nazism or apartheid. The ‘Zionism’ of the discourses of anti-Zionism is more a signifier of evil rather than a word which signifies an actual set of changing and plural philosophies and practices. Anti-Zionism portrays itself as part of an emancipatory worldview but its demonization of Zionism often assumes darker and more totalitarian hues and is attracted to conspiratorial thinking. It does not seek peace and reconciliation in the Middle East but rather to the elimination of the evil wherever it is to be found[12] (Hirsh: p.189).

Hirsh analyses the writings of one critic of Zionism, Joseph Massad, to illustrate how anti-Zionism collapses differing ideological and historical strands to form a Zionist monolith. Massad takes as his starting point the assertion that Zionism is a colonial movement that is constituted in ideology and practice by a religio-racial epistemology. Zionism, in his view, is defined by its commitment to building a demographically exclusive Jewish state which he incorporates into the European colonial ideology of white supremacy over colonised peoples. From its inception in the 1880s to the present day therefore, Zionism constitutes a homogenous, Jewish supremacist movement. The distinctions between left and right Zionism, between secular and religious Zionists, between Labour Zionism and the Zionism of the fundamentalist settlers are thus completely nullified in order to construct a monochromic, single edifice of Jewish supremacist nationalism (Hirsh: p.190).

Massad proceeds to extrapolate from quotes and anecdotes from Herzl, Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the actualisation of this racist idea in the Naqba in 1948 right down to the lurid call by a far-right Jewish settler and Tourist Minister Benny Elon for the expulsion of the entire Arab population from Israel in February 2002 and from an article in Israel’s leading Russian language daily the previous month suggesting that the Israeli government should use the threat of castration to force Arabs to leave Israel the assertion that Zionism is a coherent body of thought; ipso facto Jewish supremacist movement. (Hirsh: pp.190-91).

He then cites Zionism as part of the European colonial project; of a white imperialist set of crimes such as the Crusades, British rule in India, the Scramble for Africa, the colonisation of the Americas, the British Mandate in Palestine; US policy in Latin America and South East Asia during the Cold War; indeed any Western colonial atrocity over the centuries one can think off (Hirsh: P.191)

This ‘whitening’ of Jews is key to the understanding of contemporary antisemitism and interrelated developments on the contemporary left. The major development is the tendency for part of the left to identify the ‘oppressed’ more in terms of nations and national movements in their ‘liberation struggles’ against the rich, powerful ‘imperialist’ and white states of the ‘North’ or ‘West’ rather than the self-liberation of the working classes, women or other minorities within the former. (Hirsh: p.145) This has led to the grotesque spectacles of some left thinkers and activists supporting movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah and regimes such as those of Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-Un, the Taleban, Slobodan Milosevic and Vladimir Putin on (bogus) ‘anti-imperialist criteria.

Within this white/black binary, Jews occupy an ambivalent status. On the one hand anti-Semitism is the exemplar supreme of European racism with Auschwitz as its eternal memoriam. On the other hand, anti-Semitism has functioned as a ‘fetishized form of oppositional consciousness’ through which Jews are thought of as conspiratorially powerful and lurking behind the oppression of others. (Hirsh: p.145).

Hirsh draws upon the narrative of Karen Brodkin’s book[13] of the ‘whitening’ of American Jews to show how it fed into a new picture of Jews as part of a Judeo-Christian white elite. This narrative provides a framework for understanding the ideological transformation from Israel as a life-raft for oppressed and stateless victims of racism and pioneer of socialist practices such as the kibbutz into a pillar of the global system of white oppression of black people. The UN General Assembly 1975 resolution condemning Zionism as racism and the Durban Anti-Racist Conference of 2001 mark two milestones in this journey from the idealisation and romanticising of Israel to its demonization and delegitimisation by many on the left. As an illustration of this shift, consider this response by Seumas Milne, now Jeremy Corbyn’s Communications Chief, in his Guardian column to an anti-Semitic speech by President Ahmadinejad of Iran to the UN in 2009. He opined ‘what credibility is there in Geneva’s all-white boycott.

The ‘whitening’ of Jews and especially Israeli Jews can be seen in the narrative of ‘intersectionality’ in relation to the Palestinian struggle by US antizionists such as the Women’s March activist Tamika Mallory, Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill and the Michigan Democrat Rep Rashida Tlaib. Their tendency to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews or the descendants of European Jews only discounts certain demographic realities of modern Israel which are that only about 30% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi while the majority are Mizrahi who are of Middle East and North African descent. For centuries the Mizrahim lived without sovereignty and equality in the Muslim world; treated as “dhimmis”, an Arabic term for a protected minority whose members pay for that protection, which can be withdrawn at any time. In the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war 850,000 Mizrahi Jews were expelled from Arab lands and took refuge in Israel[14]; an episode that conveniently escapes the notice of many anti-Zionists.

Also escaping their notice are certain salient facts about the inception of the State of Israel and its position in global politics for the early years of its existence. Israel would not have come into existence when it did had not the Soviet bloc voted for the UN Partition Resolution on 29th November 1947 and it would have been wiped out at birth had it not been armed by Stalin’s Soviet Union against a British and American arms embargo (at a time when Stalin was actively persecuting Jews at home). It was only in the early 1960s that a US-Israeli alliance began to develop and was cemented after the Six Day War in response to the Soviet shift in the 1950s towards alignment with Arab nationalist regimes. These wider geo-political factors undermine the Western colonial implant and the Israel-as-America’s-regional-police-force stories as faithfully told by left anti-Zionists. As does the fact that when America does intervene in the Middle East it relies on regional Arab or Muslim allies such as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for support rather than Israel (Hirsh: pp.198-99).

How to interpret the transformative effect on the Shoah/Holocaust poses the greatest intellectual and practical conundrum for anti-Zionists. The prominent anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein attributes ‘the Zionist denial of Palestinians’ rights, culminating in their expulsion’ not to ‘an unavoidable accident’ but to ‘the systematic and conscientious implementation, over many decades … of a political ideology the goal of which was to create a demographically Jewish state in Palestine’. (Hirsh: p.200) He takes issue with the former anti-Zionist Isaac Deutscher who spent his early political life in the Yiddish-speaking environment of the Jewish Left in Europe before the Holocaust and who, while never identifying as a Zionist, came round to the view that the Shoah/Holocaust had made the creation of the State of Israel a ‘historic necessity’ but that Zionist leaders had acted irrationally in refusing to ‘remove or assuage the grievance’ of Palestinian Arabs. For Finkelstein the ‘historic necessity’ argument flies in the face of ‘the Zionist movement’s massive and, in many respects, impressive exertion of will’ (Hirsh: p.200) in achieving its goal of achieving a demographically pure Jewish nation-state. He says that the Palestinians’ chief grievance was the denial of their homeland and that ‘Zionists’ could only remove this grievance by negating the ‘raison d ‘etre’, the fundamental essence of ‘Zionism’. (Hirsh: p.201).

In trying to justify his case that Israel is definitionally racist, Finkelstein refuses, like many anti-Zionists, to engage with or attribute to in any way to the materiality, the real-life transformative circumstances of the Shoah/Holocaust in the creation of the State of Israel. For the narrative of the survivors of the Final Solution being denied entry to Palestine by the then British Mandate authorities and held in ships off Cyprus in 1945-46 drives a coach-and-horses through the binary categories that constitutes anti-Zionism: white/non-white; oppressor/oppressed; good nationalism/bad nationalism; coloniser/colonised (Hirsh: p.201).

While Deutscher argues that the foundation of Israel can only be understood by the events that preceded it; Finkelstein sees Deutscher as using the Shoah/Holocaust in order to justify Israeli human rights abuses; a view which he fully expounds on in his polemic The Holocaust Industry. For Finkelstein ‘the Zionists’ were totally responsible for Palestinian sufferings or were innocent refugees in which case they should have behaved in the manner expected of innocent refugees (according to the romantic left). Deutscher, by contrast, tries to rationalise the feelings of Jewish refugees taught to be fearful, angry and distrustful through their experiences in Europe and the Middle East.

Anti-Zionist narratives, as well as some pro-Israeli ones, flatten the experiences of the Palestinians into a single perspective (and conversely those of the Israelis). No account is taken of the complexities of the relationships between the Palestinian leadership and their peoples nor between Palestinians and Arab states many of whom have refused to integrate Palestinian refugees into their societies and whose instrumentalised hostility to Zionism to deflect from their own failings. Similarly, there is near silence on the virulence of anti-Semitism in the Arab world (and parts of the wider Islamic world) and terrorist and anti-Semitic attacks on Jews are interpreted by anti-Zionism as fundamentally defensive responses to Zionism. Cosmopolitan approaches to Israel/Palestine which search for the bases for a genuine peace and which do not infantilise or deny agency to Palestinians by considering the differences in opinion, politics and choices within their society (nor which conversely demonise Israel and Israelis) threaten the purity and simplistic anti-imperialist/imperialist dualism of anti-Zionism (Hirsh: pp.202-06 (and of the post 9/11 occidental left).

How Anti-Zionism Discourse Articulates Anti-Semitism 

At key moments anti-Zionist discourse, unconsciously or consciously, reproduces two classic anti-Jewish tropes, the ‘blood libel’/Jews as Christian child killers and the global Jewish conspiracy and marries the two in the following ways.

The theme of Israel as a child-killing state is increasingly common. Any incident of an under-age Palestinian killed during the conflict is liable to be interpreted and portrayed as a feature of Israel’s essentially child-killing nature (Hirsh: p.208).

The child-killing theme is articulated viscerally in visual depictions of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For example, a poster for the BDS campaign shows a wholesome Jaffa orange cut in half, out of which blood drips. The slogan reads: ‘Boycott Israeli Goods: Don’t squeeze a Jaffa, crush the occupation.’ This comingling of Jews (or Jews as Israelis), food and non-Jewish blood sends the powerful and emotive message that if you eat the Jaffa oranges that the Zionists are trying to sell you, you will be metaphorically be drinking the blood of their victims (Hirsh: pp.206-07).

In another incendiary illustration of the would-be ‘blood libel’, the self-professed antiracist Norman Finkelstein hosted an extensive gallery on his website by the Brazilian artist ‘Latuff’ who had won second prize in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s notorious competition for cartoons illustrating Holocaust denial. One image shows a swimming pool, in the shape of the Gaza strip, filled with blood. The image shows Uncle Sam luxuriating in the blood; the then Israeli premier Ehud Olmert covered in the blood and using the Israeli flag as a towel; and a UN waiter bringing a drink of blood to the swimmers while the rest of the world is depicted standing aside uninterested. Another image shows an innocent child who is either Lebanese or is representing Lebanon itself, being doused in Israeli petrol. (Hirsh: pp.207-08)

The most persuasive explanation for such visual imagery lies not in pure coincidence or conscious hostility to Jews as a people but in the realm of the cultural unconscious whereby anti-Zionists draw unconsciously upon ancient anti-Semitic themes when devising and using emotive visual symbols to highlight alleged Israeli wrong-doing but are reluctant to reflect on the genealogy of prejudice that reside beneath these images (Hirsh: p.208) The whole domain of the cultural unconscious requires greater scholastic enquiry but it is fair to state that historical or popularly received stereotypes are drawn upon in other semi-conscious articulations of racism such as black criminality in the notorious Willie Horton video ad by the Republicans used in the 1988 US Presidential election and Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ in 1990.

Critiques of the emotive imagery used thus by anti-Zionists should never be used to exculpate proven Israeli wrong-doing (nor should the Shoah/Holocaust be used to prevent criticism of such either). But I (and it is only my personal opinion) think it worthwhile to point out that ‘child’-killing ‘ and ‘blood drinking’ cries are never used to the same degree of resonance in relation to child victims of wars in which the USA, UK and Russia are involved nor in the case of the killing of children by plastic or live bullets or other actions by state security forces in Northern Ireland.

Blood libel always accompanies anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In the words of Anthony Julius referenced by Hirsh, if the ‘Jews’ kill children then they certainly then conspire to hide the crime. If Israel is based on child-killing or genocide then there must be a Zionist conspiracy of Israel lobby which has the power to shield the truth from the global media (Hirsh: p.208).

The most explicit and comprehensive from of global anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is the Protocol of the Learned Elders of Zion, a late 19th Tsarist Russian forgery which purported to comprise a report of the meeting of the Jewish conspiracy in Prague. The Hamas Covenant (1988) explicitly reprints and endorses this forgery as well as holding the Jewish (not merely the Zionist) ‘enemy’ for all the revolutions, wars and imperialist ventures of modern times (Hirsh: pp.208-09)

Contemporary echoes of the hoary old Jewish conspiracy theme are found in the argument that there is a Zionist lobby that possesses such huge power and influence that it is able to send the USA to war in its interests and to taint any narrative of Israel and Palestine as contrary to its own as automatically antisemitic.

Thus, the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2006 writings on the “Israel Lobby” found it to be responsible for the decision of the USA to go to war with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein without offering any substantial evidence (dodgy dossier, anyone!) for this claim. This claim resonates with claims made throughout history that Jews start wars such as that the Boer war was caused by a Jewish diamond lobby manipulating the British Empire; America First’s key propagandist Charles Lindberg’ s claim that the leaders of ‘both the Jewish and British people … for reasons which are not American wish to involve us in the [Second World] war; Hitler’s Reichstag speech in which he threatened that if ‘Jewish financiers .. succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war … the result will be… the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe right down to the conspiracy theory that Zionists were behind 9/11 (and ISIS) with reports (printed in the Lebanese Hezbollah newspaper Al-Manah) that 4,000 Jews were told not to go to work to the World Trade Centre on the day of the attacks and of Israeli agents (of ‘Dancing Israelis’ fake notoriety) seen celebrating in New Jersey as the Twin Towers collapsed (Hirsh: pp.210-11).

So also, Robert Fisk wrote a four-page piece in the Independent newspaper on 27th April 2006 headlining ‘United States of Israel?’ that was illustrated by a full-page, colour image of the Stars and Stripes with Stars of David replacing the usual stars. The piece profiles Stephen Walt a hero, speaking truth to power, who took on the ‘Lobby’ and its egregious accusations of anti-Semitism. Fisk offers no evidence that the ‘Zionists’ forced the US into starting a war not in its own interests; nor any examples of anti-Semitism accusations directed at Mearsheimer and Walt; nor any evidence for his claims that the ‘Lobby’ stopped Noam Chomsky for having a column in an American newspapers or that it prevented the showing of the play I am Rachel Corrie in New York (Hirsh: pp.214-15).

In this process of ‘slippage’, the empirical focus on the differing organisations and interests within the broad sweep of the pro-Israel lobby within Mearsheimer and Walt’s and Fisk’s works segues or ‘slips’ into the construction of a single, unvariegated, monolith motivated by bad faith and a desire to manipulate the highest reaches of American decision-making. In the course of this slippage, Jewish symbols (Stars of David) not Israeli ones are used to convey the impression that Jews, because of their loyalty to other Jews round the world, are not patriotic Americans. The device of merging Jewish stars with the American flag has long been a weapon of choice for neo-Nazis, radical Islamist and conspiracy theorists (Hirsh: p.214).

Indeed, anti-Zionists can be quite candid in the ideological and political company they keep in the cause of assailing the all-powerful “Zionist” lobby. At a conference at the University of Chicago in October 2007 on ‘academic freedom’ and to defend Norman Finkelstein who had failed to win academic tenure at De Paul University, Chicago due to the supposed influence of the Israel Lobby, the late distinguished historian and professed antiracist Tony Judt made the following statement:

If you stand up and say [as he did] … that there is an Israel lobby … that there are a set of Jewish organisations, who do work, both in front of the scenes and behind the scenes, to prevent certain kinds of conversations, certain kinds of criticisms and so on, you come very close to saying that there is a de facto conspiracy or if you like plot or collaboration to prevent certain policy from moving a particular way… – and that sounds a lot like, you know, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiratorial theory of the Zionist Occupied Government and so on – well if it sounds like it’s unfortunate, but that’s just how it is. We cannot calibrate the truths that we’re willing to speak, if we think they are true, according to the idiocies of people [like David Duke who confirmed in an email to Judt that he was on the same page as him, Mearsheimer and Walt on the issue of the Israel lobby] who happen to agree with us for their own reasons. (Hirsh: p.215) 

Judt proceeds to try to give himself ideological and ethical cover by reminding his audience of:

… what Arthur Koestler said in Carnegie Hall in 1948 when he was asked ‘Why do you criticise Stalin – don’t you know that there are people in this country, Nixon an and who were not yet known as McCarthyites, who are also anti-Communists and will use your anti-Communism to their advantage. And Koestler’s response was that … you cannot help it if idiots once every 24 hours with their stopped political clock are on the same side as you… (Hirsh: p.216) 

However, the gulag did exist. The Jewish (or Zionist) conspiracy of the all-encompassing scale that anti-Zionists imagine does not. The McCarthyites were conspiracy theorists who say ‘reds under every bed’ in the form of every liberal schoolteacher, Hollywood actor and performing artist. Koestler and other anti-Stalinist leftists like Orwell, Trotsky, Arendt spoke out against the prevailing left orthodoxy of their time; that Stalin should not be criticised. Some contemporary leftists like Judt fail to speak out against a current left orthodoxy; that Israel and its Jewish supporters are uniquely evil and powerful. They are also blissfully ignorant or wilfully blind or perhaps do not care about the far-right elements that they attract to their antizionist orbit. The same can be said of the devotees of Jeremy Corbyn who bask in the Labour leader’s so frequently trumpeted antiracism and wallow in Israeli Embassy conspiracy theories or ‘bad faith’ refutations of anyone who raises the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour movement. In spite of, or maybe because, of their self-referenced, pure ideological leftism that they fail to understand how Zionist conspiracy theories and their obsession with the perceived evils that Israel is said to embody can act as a progenitor of an unadorned anti-Semitic movement.



Bibliography



(1) David Hirsh (2018) Contemporary Left Antisemitism London: Routledge

(2) Deborah Lipstadt (2019) Antisemitism Here and Now London: Scribe

[1]Uncategorised http://hurryupharry.org/2019/01/31/anti-zionjsim-is-antisemitism/ p.2

[2]Ibid. p.2

[3] Ibid, p.3

[4] Ibid, p.3

[5] Ibid, p.5

[6] Peter Beinart Debunking the myth that antizionism is antisemitic https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/07/debunking-myth-that-anti-zionism-is-antismemitic

[7] Ibid: p.2

[8] Ibid: p.21

[9] Antizionism is antisemitism p.6

[10] Beinart: p.3

[11] Beinart: p.4

[12] Including the British Labour Party perhaps

[13] Karen Brodkin (1999) ‘How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America

[14] Hen Mazzig No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans. Los Angeles Times 20 May 2019 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0mazzig-mizrahi-jeaws-israel-20190520-story.html


⏩  Barry Gilheany has joined the Jewish Labour Movement as an affiliate member and encourages fellow labour movement colleagues concerned about Labour’s anti-Semitism problem to do the same.

Labour Anti-Semitism: Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitic?

Tony Greenstein makes a Response to Barry Gilheany.

Barry Gilheany of the Jewish Labour Movement’s Labour Anti-Semitism & The IHRA Definition Of Antisemitism - Prevention Of Hate Crime Versus Freedom Of Speech reminds me of a fox entering a chicken coop to preach the virtues of vegetarianism. I would as soon take lessons on anti-racism from the British National Party as the Jewish Labour Movement.

I was brought up in a religious Zionist home with a father as a Rabbi. Despite this, by the age of 16, I realised that Marxism, which believes in the unity of the working class and universal principles of solidarity, was incompatible with Zionism which sees the unity of Jews as its guiding principle. To Zionism there is only one question: ‘is it good for the Jews’.

The Jewish Labour Movement is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation whose Settlement Division has as its purpose the financing of settlements in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. See ‘World Zionist Organization Settlement Division Finances Illegal West Bank Outposts’ There is nothing socialist about the JLM. It is akin to the now forgotten Liverpool Protestant Party.

The development of Unionism and Zionism followed very similar lines. In 1921 Ireland was partitioned. In 1920 the Mandate of Palestine effectively began. The Colonial Secretary presiding over the birth of both Unionism and Zionism was Winston Churchill.

Zionism was the bastard cousin of Irish Unionism. As Sir Ronald Storrs, the first Military Governor of Jerusalem explained, ‘A Jewish State will be for England a little, loyal Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’.

But I forget. Gilheaney’s concern is not Israel or Zionism but anti-Semitism. The fact that he is a member of an overtly pro-Zionist organisation is merely coincidental. He tells us that ‘the Jewish charity, the Community Security Trust’ has reported an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the first 6 months of the year from 810 to 892, nearly all of which is due to Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. Corbyn:

if not anti-Semitic himself, (he) has enabled anti-Semitism to grow on his watch just as Donald Trump has enabled and assisted in the growth of racism and race prejudice since becoming President of the USA.

Truly there is a veritable pogrom going on in Britain today, all of which is Corbyn’s fault. 

It is difficult to know whether or not to laugh or cry at this nonsense. The reality is that there is probably less anti-Semitism today in Britain than there has ever been. The figures of the CST have little or no basis in fact. They are literally plucked out of thin air. You have more chance of accuracy if you span the wheel in a game of roulette than relying on the CST.

In its Anti-Semitic Incidents Report for January-June 2019 the CST informed us that the 892 anti-Semitic incidents recorded were the highest ever for any six months period. It explained that this ‘can partly be attributed to increasing reports of online expressions of antisemitism.’ An online expression of anti-Semitism, such as a Tweet or Facebook post has now become an anti-Semitic incident. If only the victims of the Kishinev and Odessa pogroms in Russia had been so lucky. As far as I know no one has ever died from a tweet!

One person can cause a Twitter storm. There is no possible way in which the level of racism in society can be measured by engaging in a social media lucky dip. It’s completely impressionistic.

CST are being wholly disingenuous spinning their statistics in order to reach the desired conclusions. They explain that of the 892 incidents of anti-Semitism, no less than 323 of them consisted of online anti-Semitism, a full 36%. In 2018, for the same period, there were 221 such incidents, i.e. 27%. If you strip out on line anti-Semitism altogether then there has been a decrease in anti-Semitism over the past year from 589 to 569.

The CST records 85 assaults in the first six months of 2019 compared to 62 the previous year, an increase of 37%. The strange thing is that not one of these assaults were classified as ‘extreme’ i.e. causing injury or a threat to someone’s life. Yet when it comes to similar statistics for racial attacks, the number of serious incidents of violence compared to less serious or trivial assaults is about one-third. Even more strange the number of assaults compared to racial incidents generally is also of the order of one-third, so if the 892 anti-Semitic incidents were genuine then one would expect something like 300 not 85 assaults.

Why is it that the CST’s statistics are out of kilter with all other measures of racial incidents? Is it because they are being driven by a hidden political agenda or special interests or indeed that the CST is more assiduous in collecting statistics? We don’t know because the CST, although in receipt of large amounts of public money is completely unaccountable. There is no way of knowing whether what they call ‘anti-Semitism’ is driven by a Zionist/pro-Israel agenda.

It would for example be interesting to know how many of these 85 assaults were recorded as crimes or subject to any form of prosecution? The answer is we don’t know, nor do we know what the criteria is for ‘abusive incidents’ and how they are distinguished from normal political argument. The CST is not a politically neutral organisation. It is openly Zionist. It sees as part of its remit collecting information on Jewish anti-Zionists and keeping anti-Zionists out of Zionist meetings. It compiles files on Jewish anti-Zionists (I obtained a massive file when I made a Subject Access Request a few years ago).

The CST finds it difficult to make a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It says that they do not ‘not consider criticism of Israel or Zionism inherently antisemitic’ which is a strange way to put it. In other words anti-Zionism is usually anti-Semitic! Whatever else you could accuse the CST of it’s not political neutrality.

The CST admits that:

There were 203 allusions to Israel, the Middle East or Zionism, used in antisemitic incidents recorded by CST, of which 18 directly compared or equated Israel with the Nazis.’ 

Equating Israel or Zionism to the Nazis isn’t anti-Semitic. Israelis do it all the time, See Calling Your Political Rival a Nazi Is a Time-hallowed Tradition in Israel.

The truth is that a decrease in anti-Semitism wouldn’t serve CST’s purposes. CST is not merely a Zionist organisation, it is effectively a para-state body. It has close links to both the British and Israeli states. The Home Office gave it 13.4 million in 2018. See para. s.6.2 of its own annual report ‘Working with the Government, Civil Servants and the Police’.

When the CST’s Security Director Carol Laser retired ‘Scotland Yard presented her with a commendation usually reserved for officers shot in the line of duty.’ As Ms Laser admitted ‘"Nothing comes higher than the protection around the Israelis.’

However when Raed Saleh, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Northern Israel came to visit Britain in 2011 he was greeted by an exclusion order and an attempt by Theresa May to deport him. The ‘evidence’ against him was provided by the CST. This evidence included a poem of his which had been doctored to include words relating to Jews. Channel 4 reported:

The government’s main source of information was from the Jewish run Community Security Trust (CST). The CST has denied that it in any way misled the government. The group has also expressed disappointment that the exclusion order has been overturned.

It is trite knowledge to say that Zionists use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a propaganda weapon against their opponents. This is why according to Tony Lerman, the founder of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Mossad (MI6), with which the CST has close links, took over the monitoring and collation of anti-Semitism statistics.

Lerman was later forced to resign from his post because of his views. He documented what happened in Antisemitism Redefined [‘On Anti-Semitism’ Haymarket Books, 2017].

I had close personal experience of the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) and its successor, the 'Institute for Jewish Policy Research OPR) in the 1990s, I founded and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report... The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it clear to me that they were very unhappy about our independent operation and then tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce.

What possible reason could there be for Mossad to take over responsibility for the monitoring of anti-Semitism in Jewish communities abroad? Can you imagine MI6 getting involved in the race relations business in Britain? There is only one explanation and it is that ‘anti-Semitism’ is a vital part of the political defence of Israel.

The statistics of anti-Semitism compiled by the CST are not worth the paper they are written on. They are part of Israel’s propaganda war against its adversaries. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies and CST statistics.

Gilheany says that ‘one of the kernels of the Labour anti-Semitism dispute relates to Israel and Zionism’ and that the document at the heart of it is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism.

Which is like saying that opposition to the British presence in Ireland makes you an anti-British racist or that support for a United Ireland means you are anti-Protestant. Zionism like Unionism is a political not a racial project and opposition to them is political not racial.

The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism is a racist’s charter. Why does one even need a definition unless there is a hidden agenda? When my dad joined 100,000 Jews and non-Jews at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to stop Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists marching through the Jewish East End of London he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what anti-Semitism is! It’s a complete nonsense.

The IHRA isn’t even a definition. It’s 500+ words long. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is just 6 words. The IHRA is so long because that’s how much it takes to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The IHRA definition has been around, in one guise or another, since 2005. The definition has been criticised by academic researchers such as Brian Klug, David Feldman, and Antony Lerman; jurists including Hugh Tomlinson QC, Stephen Sedley, Geoffrey Bindman QC, and Geoffrey Robertson QC who described it as ‘not fit for purpose.. Even the original drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth S. Stern stated that: ‘“The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.,”. “It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.”

The IHRA has 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’, seven of which refer to Israel. For example ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ In Nazi Germany mobs chanted Death to the Jews. In Israel mobs chant Death to the Arabs. Why is this anti-Semitic? Is Ze’ev Sternhell, a childhood survivor of a Polish Ghetto an anti-Semite for writing about Israel’s ‘Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.’

Another example of ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘Applying double standards by requiring of it[Israel] a behaviour not demanded or expected of any other democratic nation.’ Which begs the question, is Israel a democratic state? Israel is an ethnocracy not a democracy. Its Jewish majority was created out of the forced expulsion of the native Palestinians. If you don’t accept that Israel is democratic then you are declared ‘anti-Semitic’. There was a time when anti-Semitism was about hating Jews, not criticising Israel or Zionism.

According to the IHRA ‘Denial of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination’ is anti-Semitic. Gilheany argues that if you oppose the right of every other national minority, from the Kurds to the Catalans, to an independent state then you ‘would not be seen as a priori anti-Semitic’. This is not true but is in any case irrelevant.

It used to be the case when it was those who argued that Jews constituted a separate nation who were condemned as anti-Semites. Jews argued that they were British and Jewish by religion. The Zionist belief that Jews are strangers whose ‘real home’ is in Israel was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Indeed this is the real purpose of this false and confected ‘anti-Semitism’. To persuade Jews that they should ‘return’ to Israel.

Lucien Wolfe, who was Secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies wrote, during the negotiations around the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies, which has absolutely no justification in history, ethnology or the facts of everyday life, and if they were admitted by the Jewish people as a whole, the result would only be that the terrible situation of our coreligionists in Russia and Romania would become the common lot of Jewry throughout the world.

As Isaac Deutscher wrote in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays:

the great majority of East European Jews were, (up to the outbreak of the second World War) opposed to Zionism … the most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish … they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from East Europe to Palestine … in the idea of an evacuation, of an exodus from the countries in which they, had their homes and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out.

As anti-Semitism increased in Poland so did support for Zionism wane. In the last local elections in 1938, out of the 20 Jewish Council seats in Warsaw 17 were won by the anti-Zionist Bund and just one by the Zionists. Everywhere in Poland it was the same story. Zionism was seen as a capitulation to anti-Semitism.

Gilheany’s conspiracy theories about Stalinism and the Soviet Union lying behind the revelations of Nazi-Zionist collaboration are absurd. It wasn’t Stalin who was responsible for the fall of the second Sharrett government in Israel in 1955 but the verdict in the Kasztner libel trial, brought as a result of the accusations of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust against the leader of Hungarian Zionism that his collaboration had led to the deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews. It is a fact, amply documented by Zionist historians such as Francis Nicosia and Lucy Dawidowicz, that the Zionists were the favoured Jews of the Nazis, the ones who traded with them not campaigned against them.

Zionism is and always has been a reactionary movement and ideology. Today that should be clear to all when the best friends of Israel are anti-Semitic leaders like Trump, Orban and Duterte. When even the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right in the United States, Richard Spencer openly boasts that he is a White Zionist and Netanyahu’s own son pens an anti-Semitic cartoon of George Soros that is immediately republished by David Duke of the KKK then it should be clear why Gilheany’s attempts to portray the Left as anti-Semitic are, to quote Neil Young, pissing in the wind …  Socialist Zionism was always an oxymoron, today it is simply a bad joke.

⏭ Tony Greenstein is a socialist, anti-Zionist and anti-racist.

Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism Nor Is Support For The Palestinians

Tony Greenstein challenges the use of CST statistics to explain anti-Semitism. 

I was alerted to criticism on the Pensive Quill by a Zionist, Barry Gilheany. Out of curiosity more than anything else, I searched out my budding foe only to discover that the site was a Republican blog run by Anthony McIntyre, a former member of the Provisional IRA and which has on its masthead Dolours Price, one half of the Price sisters who were gaoled for bombing the Old Bailey in 1973 and Brendan Hughes who initiated the hunger strikes in the 1980’s. I assume that both had an involvement in, if not the site itself then The Blanket, a republican journal. 

I found it strange, to say the least, that a Zionist should have a series of articles published on what is a Republican blog since Zionism and Unionism/Loyalism have always gone together. British Military Governor, Sir Ronald Storrs wrote in his autobiography, Orientations, that the Jewish settler state-in-the-making was ‘a little loyal Ulster in a sea of hostile pan-Arabism.’ In other words the insertion of the Jewish settler colonial project into the Arab heartland was designed to further imperialist designs just as the creation of a Protestant Supremacist state in Ireland had done.

The DUP, which is a sectarian Protestant party, has always been a pro-Zionist party. On the Zionist demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ in March 2018 during the local elections, joining the Board of Deputies was DUP MP Ian Paisley Jnr. His father was a notorious supporter of Israel.

Conversely the Republicans have always been supporters of the Palestinians. When I went, as part of the Troops Out of Ireland delegations to Northern Ireland during The Troubles in the 1970’s and 1980’s the Catholic ghettoes were festooned with mural supporting the Palestinian struggle and the Palestinian flag was everywhere. Likewise when, as part of a Brighton Labour Party delegation to the North we visited Andy Tyrie, the Commander of the Ulster Defence Association and John McMichael of the UDA (later assassinated) they told us of how they identified with the Israelis and saw the PLO as the equivalent of the ‘terrorists’ in the IRA whom they were fighting.

Gilheany based much of his article on the discredited statistics of the latest Zionist Community Security Trust’s January-June 2019 Anti-Semitic Incidents Report. It is clear, even from a cursory reading, that this Report has been tailored in order to provide a weapon to the Labour Party Witchhunt.

It states that:

There were 102 anti-Semitic incidents recorded by CST that targeted Jewish organisations and events, rising by 59 per cent from the 64 such incidents reported between January and June 2018. This increase can largely be accounted for in the online response to Jewish leadership organisations issuing statements on social media regarding antisemitism in the Labour Party. Many of these anti-Semitic reactions were in the wider context of ‘smear’ accusations, spoke of conspiracy and attempted to delegitimise clear evidence of antisemitism; while others specifically targeted the social media accounts of Jewish organisations to respond to statements about antisemitism in the UK by holding these British Jewish organisations responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.

This is tendentious. Who were these ‘Jewish’ organisations? The Board of Deputies presumably. What was the ‘clear evidence of anti-Semitism’ that was being delegitimized? Criticism of Israel? Attacks by the Board on Chris Williamson? We are not told but what we do know is that from their previous record the CST is closely linked to the Israeli state. The CST Report states that:

In 100 cases – 11 per cent of all anti-Semitic incidents recorded by CST from January to June 2019 – the offender or offenders, and the abuse they expressed, were related to the Labour Party or the incidents occurred in the context of arguments about alleged Labour Party anti-Semitism.

This is meaningless waffle. Without further details of these ‘incidents’ we have no way of knowing what it was that was being said and whether, like all Zionist organisations, CST is deliberately obfuscating and confusing the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Even so, the fact that the ‘increase’ in incidents of ‘anti-Semitism’ are wholly related to social media and the Internet suggests this Report has one purpose and one purpose only. To add oil to the fire of false accusations of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism used to be about discrimination, physical assaults, verbal hostility. Now it appears to be a hostile tweet.

What would be interesting is if the CST or better still some independent organisation was to monitor and evaluate the degree of racism in the Jewish community. My suspicion is that it would far outweigh any anti-Semitism, fake or actual, that is alleged in non-Jewish people. However such a poll would not be politically convenient so it is doubtful anyone will be sponsoring it!

⏭ Tony Greenstein is a socialist, anti-Zionist and anti-racist.

The Community Security Trust’s Statistics On Anti-Semitism Are Fake, False And Fraudulent

Barry Gilheany discusses Soviet anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

The current crisis in the Labour Party concerning anti-Semitism has much to do (but not exclusively) to do polarising positions of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the related issue as to what extent antizionism is a variant of; an intrinsic part of or completely distinct from anti-Semitism. Much of the ballast behind the demonization of Zionism particularly its most explosive constituents, that there is an affinity between Zionism and Nazism and that there was a history of strategic collaboration between both was provided by the propaganda of former Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Cold War era. I now provide a brief history of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign and how it relates to the anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic controversies of today as they impact on the crisis on the Left, particularly in the British Labour Party, on anti-Semitism.

In 1985, the KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, known by its Russian acronym as AKSO, issued a brochure, Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism. The brochure was translated into English and distributed abroad by Novosti Press Agency, a news service and an important weapon of Soviet foreign propaganda (Tabarovsky: 2019).

This brochure portrayed a harrowing vista of Zionism. Senior members of the AKSO, most of whom were prominent Soviet Jews (a deliberate choice by the KGB in order to stymie accusations of anti-Semitism), claimed that they had cast iron proof of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. They described Zionists of facilitators of Nazi expansionism, accused them of falsely inflating the import of anti-Semitism and Jewish victimhood in the Second World War and claimed that the Haavara 1930s transfer agreement that enabled the emigration of 60,000 German Jews to Palestine had made it "easier" for the Nazis to unleash World War II. They alleged that Zionists had colluded in the genocide of “Slavs, Jews and some other peoples of Europe”. They rejected in advance any attempts by the “Zionist press” to describe the committee’s claims as anti-Semitic and disassociated Zionists from Jews (Tabarovsky: p.1).

The cynical distortion of history that this scurrilous publication promoted was an integral part of a massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that assumed a particular momentum in 1967 - the year of the Six Day War. This campaign used the significant Soviet broadcasting and publishing capacity abroad as well as front organisations and allied communist and other far left organisations in the West and Third World countries to disseminate its messages to foreign audiences. In the course of the campaign hundreds of antizionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles were published in the USSR and were translated into numerous foreign languages in addition to the demonization of Zionism in many films, lectures, broadcasts and cartoons; many of the anti-Semitic tropes used were borrowed secretly from Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion despite Soviet protestations of antifascism and many of the authors were directly linked to Communist Party leaders and the KGB (Tabarovsky: p.2).

Since Soviet generated anti-Zionism was a significant factor in the morphing of perceptions of Zionism of many on the Left from an emancipatory movement for the Jewish people to one associated with racism, colonialism, militarism, Nazism and apartheid and contributed to the infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which held Zionism to be a form of racism and since its memes figure prominently in the anti-Semitic discourse of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, it is important to examine the origins of the far-left’s anti-Zionist discourse, especially its intersection points with anti-Semitism.

The idea of Zionism as a hostile ideology developed in the early 1950s in the post-World War II USSR as Israel’s alignment with the ‘imperialist camp’ rather than the Soviet Union became clear. Allegations of Zionist conspiracy was to be a salient feature of Stalinist purge trials. The Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952 in particular featured the idea of ‘international Zionism’ as a worldwide conspiracy aiming to destroy socialism. (Tabarovsky: p.2) The spectre of the ‘Cosmopolitan Jew’ also loomed large in the ‘Jewish doctors’ trial just before Stalin’s death.

A key moment in the early stage of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 which with its exclusive focus on the extermination of European Jewry in the Shoah/Holocaust challenged Soviet concepts of Slavic victimhood in World War II. The Soviet response was to attack Israel’s diplomatic relationship with West Germany which the Soviets depicted as a ‘fascist’ heir to Nazi Germany. Drawing upon the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet people during World War II for whom fascism and Nazism were the greatest evils imaginable, the Soviet propagandist sought to portray Zionism as an ‘obvious’ and natural bedfellow with the evils of Nazism and fascism and to evoke a visceral reaction based not on facts but pure emotion. In the 1960s also, Soviet propagandists also began to develop the idea that Zionism was an outgrowth of Judaism which it saw, with its concept of Jews as a chosen people, as an inherently racist religion and linked to American imperialism and Israeli colonialism (Tabarovsky: p.3)

Acceleration Point: The Six Day War and Soviet Antizionist Campaign

The defeat of the USSR’s Arab allies in the Arab-Israel “Six Day War” was pivotal in Soviet anti-Zionist campaigning, The ideological triumph of the ‘anti-imperialist’ camp and the awakening of national feeling among Soviet Jews generated by Israel’s victory represented for Soviet ideologues the revival of the old international Zionist enemy and its Jewish fifth column in the Soviet fatherland. This Zionist triumph therefore necessitated a new propaganda tool for domestic and foreign consumption.

Now writers such as the KGB operative Yuri Ivanov and Trofim Kichko drew on age-old tropes of Jewish conspiracy and influence to present in an article titled ‘What is Zionism’ to present Zionism as a centrally-controlled international system whose tentacles reached into all aspects of global politics, finance and the media, had infinite resources and sought to establish monopolistic domination over the entire world. Kichko in in his 1968 book Zionism and Judaism attributed the ‘crimes’ of Israeli ‘aggressors’ to Judaism posing the question ‘Weren’t the actions of the Israeli extremists during their latest aggression against the Arab countries in keeping with the Torah?’

The animus against Judaism reflected the Soviet struggles against religion with Judaism persecuted with particular harshness through the prohibition of the study of Hebrew and of the training of the next generation of clergy in the 1970s and 1980s. Such religious persecution rendered Soviet claims that it was not anti-Semitic but merely anti-Zionist untrue.

More of the same staple was to follow. One of the USSR’s foundational anti-Zionist texts was Ivanov’s 1969 book Caution Zionism! It described Zionists as representative of colonialist powers, hostile to the working people of Palestine; portrayed Judaism as the world’s most inhumane religion which through its ‘chosen people’ idea of Jews spawned the world’s most brutal nationalism. Reflecting early Bolshevik assimilationist beliefs on the Jewish question, Ivanov sought to discredit the idea of a single Jewish nation as a ‘false and reactionary’ Zionist invention which promoted a ghetto mentality amongst Jews and therefore provoked anti-Semitism (Tabarovsky: pp3-4).

The Nazi-Zionist Analogy

In the eyes of many, the drawing of analogies or comparisons between the ideologies of Nazism and Zionism and between the actions and policies of the State of Israel and Nazi Germany are the most preposterous and gratuitously offensive features of anti-Zionist discourse. 1983 saw the publication of two books of this genre which attracted international publicity thanks to the campaign by US Jewish organisations to facilitate the emigration of Soviet Jews. Both were authored by Lev Korneev; a notorious anti-Semite with a doctoral degree. On the Course of Aggression and Fascism detailed Zionism’s alleged ‘criminal alliance with the Fascists’ and blamed the Zionists for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews during the Shoah/Holocaust. The Class Essence of Zionism declared Jews a ‘fifth column in any country.’ (Tabarovsky: p.4)

Each book publication spawned an infinity of reviews and ‘analytical pieces’ aimed at different audiences, including the military, party apparatchiks, trade unions and youth. In what could be a comment on the current convulsions in the Labour Party, the Washington Post ‘s report on this output in 1979 observed: ‘Soviet bureaucrats vehemently reject suggestions that “anti-Zionism” means “anti-Semitism.” But to many Soviet Jews, it is distinction without a difference. ‘(Tabarovsky: p.4)

In addition, the Soviets produced several documentaries in support of this campaign including one, The Concealed and the Apparent: Goals and Actions of the Zionists, deemed to be so inflammatory in its manipulation of historical footage and deeply anti-Semitic imagery and Nazi-Zionist parallels that it was only shown to selected audiences. (Tabarovsky: p.4)

The early 1980s saw the creation of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public whose remit was to produce brochures and deliver press conferences on the evils of Zionism and Israel. A 1985 TASS broadcast commenting on one of the committee’s English-language brochures announced:

Zionist leaders are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. It is precisely the Zionists who assisted the Nazi butchers by helping them to make up the lists of doomed inmates of ghettoes, escorting the latter to the places of extermination and convinced them to resign to the butchers. (Tabarovsky: p.4)

The Antizionist Campaign Goes Global

The main driver behind the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign in the later years of the Cold War was the prevention of Jewish emigration from the USSR to Israel and the related Western condemnations of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. The Soviets did appear to believe that a vast Zionist conspiracy did exist aimed at undermining the USSR and socialism itself. Indeed, by the mid-1970s the KGB felt that the Zionist threat was so dangerous that it justified setting up a special department focusing specifically on Zionism (Tabarovsky: p.4).

The Soviets fought Zionism abroad through information warfare conducted via its powerful state-owned media apparatus whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents. Perhaps the most important constituent of the Soviet media colossus (including Radio Moscow which broadcasted more than 1,000 hours per week in over 80 languages and the multi-lingual circulation of tens of millions of copies of newspapers and magazines) as the Novosti Press Agency, the USSR’s main foreign broadcasting arm and chief distributor of foreign propaganda, which worked in over 110 countries.

The Soviets organised their foreign antizionist messaging to suit their particular foreign policy concerns for that country or audience. For example, in Africa it was about South African apartheid and Zionism. In Latin America it was about American imperialism and Zionism.

In the Middle East the head of the Anti-Zionist Committee, General David Dragunsky, cultivated close relationships with the Arab world and especially Syria with the Soviet-Syrian Friendship Treaty of 1980 specifically named Zionism a common enemy.

Arab-language anti-Zionist literature was an important part of Soviet propaganda aimed at the Middle East. It served as source material for Mahmoud Abbas’s 1982 PhD dissertation which he undertook at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and defended at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies – an important institution within the Academy of Sciences which regularly spewed out ‘scholarly’ works demonising Zionism and Israel. The dissertation was published as an Arabic book in 2011 under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. The book replicates several mainstays of Soviet antizionism including alleged Zionist collusion with the Nazis during the Shoah/Holocaust, casting doubt on the number of victims of it and the historical falsification that Adolf Eichmann was abducted by Mossad and later executed to prevent him from disclosing the “secret” of Zionist involvement in the Shoah/Holocaust. (Tabarovsky: p.6).

In July 1990, less than a year before the collapse of the USSR, an editorial in Pravda admitted the wrongs of the anti-Zionist campaign of the previous quarter century. It said that:


Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Black Hundred and of fascist origin.



It acknowledged that ‘Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general’. But the damage had been done. A 1990 Soviet poll showed that a significant percentage of Soviet citizens thought that Zionism was ‘the policy of establishing the world supremacy of Jews’ and an ‘ideology used to justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East’. With the political freedoms brought about through Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika came the emergence of the fanatical anti-Semitic Pamyat (Memory) and Otechshestvo (Homeland) which fused Nazi and fascist ideas and Russian ethnic nationalism and led by some of the same ideologues who had waged the Soviet antizionist campaign. After the demise of the USSR, two million Jews left Russia in the following decade (Tabarovsky: p.6).

The history of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign is a case study in how, discursively and in praxis, antizionism and antisemitism can become deeply enmeshed. In accordance with their ideological bearings they never engaged in explicit Jew hate, indignantly asserting (like many accused of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party) that they were merely antizionist. But their strategic deployment of anti-Zionism enabled antisemitism to flourish. That antisemitism can be a consequence of antizionist discourse and practice is proved by the example of Poland “Cleanse the Party of Zionists” campaign in 1968 which quickly descended into an anti-Semitic witch hunt, leading to expulsions and the forced emigration of 15,000 Jews (Tabarovsky: p.7).

Conclusion

The Soviet anti-Zionist campaign of 1967-1988 was one of agitprop and disinformation. It pickled together and weaponised narratives from twisted, out-of-context, alternative facts and bogus historiography. It used age-old propaganda techniques such as deception, guilt by association to drive home key messages. It shamelessly manipulated people’s memories and emotions such as those of the massive sufferings of the Soviet people during the “Great Patriotic War” and used both Soviet Jews and Muslims as propaganda pawns.

By substituting anti-Zionism for anti-Semitism, it appealed to many well-intentioned and progressive individuals (not useful idiots) in the West who would have been otherwise repelled by overt anti-Semitic overtones. Looking at the content of bitter debates over the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Labour Party; Ken Livingstone’s view that Hitler supported Zionism in the 1930s and Jewish emigration to Palestine “before he went mad and killed six million Jews”; that Zionists collaborated in the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944 to ensure that some Jews be allowed to go to Palestine; that Israel was a settler-colonial enterprise founded on the same racist ideology as Nazism and Apartheid-era South Africa; that it is an outpost of American imperialism ; that Zionists through the tentacles of Israeli embassies and advocacy/ campaign organisations and favoured spokespersons which comprise the ubiquitous Israeli Lobby control the world’s banks, media outlets and political decision-makers, one can trace a not so distant lineage to the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign (Tabarovsky: p.7).

Just as the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign had nothing really to do with justice for the Palestinians and proper peace and reconciliation with the Israelis but was about bolstering one of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrannies so their copycats in the Labour Party, many of whom have migrated from the Marxist-Leninist left, in treating Israel-Palestine as an empty vessel into which to project their own ideological and identity phantasies (as certain far right figures such as Katie Hopkins and lobbies such as Christian Dispensationalists project their pathologies onto Israel). Labour anti-Zionists may vehemently abjure any anti-Semitic prejudice or motivation but as has already been shown by those who have mined the seams of Corbynista and (purportedly) pro-Palestinian social media ecology these two “antis” have formed more than the occasional marriage of convenience. The post-Soviet careers of the manufacturers of the Soviet antizionist campaign provide a possible clue as to the ultimate political destiny of Labour’s antizionist campaign, if they have not already formed (informally at least) their red-brown alliance.

References

Izabella Tabarovsky, 2019,  Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism Fathom Journal, May.

⏩  Barry Gilheany has joined the Jewish Labour Movement as an affiliate member and encourages fellow labour movement colleagues concerned about Labour’s anti-Semitism problem to do the same.

Soviet Anti-Zionism And Labour Anti-Semitism: A Chronicle Foretold And Retold?

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