Chief
Rabbi Mirvis is helping stoke antisemitism
By
Jonathan Cook
November 28/29, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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Chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not only
misrepresented the known facts about Labour and
its supposed antisemitism crisis. He has not
only interfered in an overtly, politically
partisan manner in the December 12 election
campaign by suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn –
against all evidence – is an antisemite.
By speaking out as the voice of British Jews – a
false claim he has allowed the UK media to
promote – his unprecedented meddling in the
election of Britain’s next leader has actually
made the wider Jewish community in the UK much
less safe. Mirvis is contributing to the very
antisemitism he says he wants to eradicate.
Mirvis’
intervention in the election campaign makes
sense only if he believes in one of two
highly improbable scenarios.
The first requires several demonstrably
untrue things to be true. It needs for Corbyn to
be a proven antisemite – and not just of the
variety that occasionally or accidentally lets
slip an antisemitic trope or is susceptible to
the unthinking prejudice most of us occasionally
display, including (as we shall see) Rabbi
Mirvis.
No, for Mirvis to have interfered in the
election campaign he would need to believe that
Corbyn intends actively as prime minister to
inflame a wider antisemitism in British society
or implement policies designed to harm the
Jewish community. And in addition, the chief
rabbi would have to believe that Corbyn presides
over a Labour party that will willingly indulge
race-hate speeches or stand by impassively as
Corbyn carries out racist policies.
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If Mirvis really believes any of that, I have
a bridge to sell him. Corbyn has spent his
entire political career as an anti-racism
campaigner, and his anti-racism activism as a
backbencher was especially prominent inside a
party that itself has traditionally taken the
political lead in tackling racism.
Rising tide of nationalism
The second possibility is that Mirvis doesn’t
really believe that Corbyn is a Goebbels in the
making. But if that is so, then his decision to
intercede in the election campaign to influence
British voters must be based on an equally
fanciful notion: that there is no significant
threat posed by antisemitism from the right or
the rapidly emerging far right.
Because if antisemitism is not an issue on
the right – the same nationalistic right that
has persecuted Jews throughout modern history,
culminating in the Nazi atrocities – then Mirvis
may feel he can risk playing politics in the
name of the Jewish community without serious
consequence.
If there is no perceptible populist tide of
white nationalism sweeping Europe and the globe,
one that hates immigrants and minorities, then
making a fuss about Corbyn might seem to make
sense for a prominent Jewish community leader.
In those circumstances, it might appear to be
worth disrupting the national conversation to
highlight the fact that Corbyn once sat with
Hamas politicians – just as Tony Blair once sat
with Sinn Fein leaders – and that Corbyn’s party
has promised in the latest manifesto to
stop selling weapons to Israel (and Saudi
Arabia) of the kind that have been used to
butcher children in Gaza. Mirvis might believe
that by wounding Corbyn he can help into power a
supposedly benevolent, or at least inoffensive,
Tory party.
But if
he is wrong about the re-emergence of a white
nationalism and its growing entry into the
mainstream – and all the evidence suggests he
would be
deeply wrong,
if this is what he thinks – then undermining
Corbyn and the Labour party is
self-destructiveness of the first order.
It
would amount to self-harm not only because
attacking Corbyn inevitably strengthens the
electoral chances of Boris “watermelon
smiles”
Johnson. It plays with fire because Mirvis’
flagrant intervention in the election campaign
actually bolsters a key part of the antisemitic
discourse of the far right that is rapidly
making inroads into the Conservative party.
Succour to white nationalists
White
nationalists are all over social media warning
of supposed Jewish global conspiracies, of
supposed Jewish control of the media, of
supposed Jewish subversion of “white rights”. It
was precisely this kind of thinking that drove
European politics a century ago. It was
arch-antisemite
Arthur Balfour who signed off the Balfour
Declaration of 1917 that sought to end Britain’s
“Jewish problem” by encouraging European Jews to
move far away, to a part of the Middle East then
known as Palestine.
That
is, of course, why today’s white supremacists
love Israel, why they see it as a model, why
they call themselves “white
Zionists“.
In creating a tribal democracy, and one heavily
fortified, land hungry, belligerent and
nuclear-armed, Israel has done for Jews exactly
what white nationalists hope to do again for
their white compatriots. The white supremacists’
love of Israel is intimately bound up with their
hatred and fear of Jews.
Mirvis
has given succour to white nationalist discourse
both because he has spoken out against Corbyn
without offering evidence for his claims and
because those entirely unsubstantiated claims
have been echoed across the media.
There
is good
reason
why the billionaire-owned print media and the
Establishment-dominated BBC are happy to exploit
the antisemitism smears – and it has nothing to
do with concern for the safety of Jews. The
corporate media don’t want a Labour leader in
power who is going to roll back the corporate
free-for-all unleashed by Margaret Thatcher 40
years ago that nearly bankrupted the rest of us
in 2008.
But
that is not what those flirting with or
embracing white nationalism will take away from
the relentless media chorus over evidence-free
antisemitism claims.
Mirvis’
intervention in the democratic process will
drive them more quickly and more deeply into the
arms of the far-right. It will persuade them
once again that “the Jews” are a “problem”. They
will conclude that – though the Jews are now
helping the right by destroying Corbyn – once
the left has been dealt with, those same Jews
will then subvert their white state. Like
Balfour before them, they will start thinking of
how to rid Britain and Europe of these supposed
interlopers.
This is
why Mirvis was irresponsible in the extreme for
meddling. Because the standard of proof required
before making such an intervention – proof
either that Cobyn is an outright Jew hater, or
that white nationalism is no threat to the UK –
is not even close to being met.
The left’s anti-imperialism
In fact
much worse, all the evidence shows the exact
reverse. That was neatly summed up in a
survey
this month published by The Economist, a weekly
magazine that is no friend to Corbyn or the
Labour party.
It
showed that those identifying as “very
left-wing” – the section of the public that
supports Corbyn – were among the least likely to
express antisemitic attitudes. Those identifying
as “very right-wing”, on the other hand – those
likely to support Boris “piccaninnies”
Johnson – were three and a half times more
likely to express hostile attitudes towards
Jews. Other surveys show
even worse racism
among Conservatives towards more obviously
non-white minorities, such as Muslims and black
people. That, after all, is the very reason
Boris “letterbox-looking
Muslim women”
Johnson now heads the Tory party.
The
Economist findings reveal something else of
relevance in assessing Mirvis’ meddling. Not
only is the real left (as distinguished from the
phoney, centrist left represented by Labour’s
Blairites) much less antisemitic than the right,
it is also much more critical of Israel than any
other section of the British public.
That is
easily explained. The real left has always been
anti-imperialist. Israel is a particularly
problematic part of Britain’s colonial legacy.
Elsewhere, the peoples who gained independence
from Britain found themselves inside ruined,
impoverished states, often with borders imposed
out of naked imperial interest that left them
divided and feuding. Internal struggles over the
crumbs Britain and other imperial powers left
behind were the norm.
But in
a very real sense, Britain – or at least the
west – never really left Israel. In line with
the Balfour Declaration, Britain helped to
establish the institutions of a “Jewish home” on
the Palestinians’ homeland. British troops may
have departed in 1948, but waves of European
Jewish immigrants were either encouraged or
compelled to come to the newly created state of
Israel by racist immigration quotas designed to
prevent them fleeing elsewhere, most especially
to the United States.
The
west helped engineer both the ethnic cleansing
of Palestine and Israel’s creation to solve
Europe’s “Jewish problem”. It provided the
components necessary for Israel to build a
nuclear bomb that won it a place at the
international top table and ensured the
Palestinians were made Israel’s serfs in
perpetuity. Ever since, the west has provided
Israel with diplomatic cover, military aid and
special trading status, even as Israel has
worked relentlessly to disappear the Palestinian
people from their homeland.
Even
now, our most prized rights, such as free
speech, are being eroded and subverted to
protect Israel from criticism. In the US, the
only infringements on the American public’s
First Amendment rights have been legislated to
silence those
seeking to pressure Israel over its crimes
against the Palestinians with a boycott –
similar to the campaign against apartheid South
Africa. In the UK, the Conservative manifesto
similarly promises to
bar
local councils from upholding international law
and boycotting products from Israel’s illegal
settlements.
Rewarding war crimes
The
real left focuses on this continuing colonial
crime against the Palestinians not because it is
antisemitic (a claim the Economist survey amply
refutes), but because the left treats Israel as
emblematic of British and western bad faith and
hypocrisy. Israel is the imperial west’s
Achilles’ heel, the proof that war crimes,
massacres and ethnic cleansing are not only
not punished but actively rewarded if these
crimes accord with western imperial interests.
But
ardent friends of Israel such as Mirvis are
blind to these arguments. For them, one western
antisemitic crime – the Holocaust – entirely
obscures another western antisemitic crime:
seeking to rid Europe of Jews by forcing them
into the Middle East, serving as pawns on an
imperial chessboard that paid no regard to the
Palestinians whose homeland was being
sacrificed.
In his
state of historical and political myopia, Mirvis
cannot begin to understand that there might be
political activists who, in defending the
Palestinian people, are also defending Jews.
That they, unlike him, understand that Israel
was created not out of western benevolence
towards Jews, but out of western malevolence
towards “lesser peoples”. The real left in
Britain speaks out against Israel not because it
hates Jews but because it holds dear a
commitment to justice and a compassion for all.
Mirvis,
on the other hand, is the Zionist equivalent of
a little Englander. He prefers particularist,
short-term interests over universalist,
long-term ones.
It was
he, remember, who threw his
full support
behind Israel in 2014 as it indiscriminately
bombed Gaza, killing some 550 children – a
bombing campaign that came after years of an
Israeli blockade on the Palestinian population
there. That siege has led the United Nations to
warn that the enclave will be
uninhabitable
by next year.
It was
Mirvis, along with his predecessor Jonathan
Sacks, who in 2017
endorsed the
fanatical Jewish settlers – Israel’s equivalent
of white supremacists – on their annual march
through the occupied Old City of Jerusalem. This
is the march where the majority of the
participants are recorded every year waving
masses of Israeli flags at Palestinians and
chanting “Death to the Arabs”. One Israeli
newspaper columnist has
described
the Jerusalem Day march as a “religious carnival
of hatred”.
It was
Mirvis and Sacks that encouraged British Jews to
join them on this tub-thumping trip to Israel,
which they
suggested
would provide an opportunity to spend time
“dancing with our brave soldiers”. Those
soldiers – Israeli, not British – occupy West
Bank cities like Hebron where they have locked
down life for some 200,000 Palestinians so that
a handful of crazed religious Jewish bigots can
live undisturbed in their midst.
What is
so appalling is that Mirvis is blind to the very
obvious parallels between the fearful
Palestinians who hastily have to board up their
shops as a Jewish mob parades through their
neighbourhood and today’s white supremacists and
neo-Nazis in the west who seek to march
provocatively through ethnic minority
communities, including Jewish neighbourhoods, in
places like
Charlottesville.
Mirvis
has no lessons to teach Corbyn or the Labour
party about racism. In fact, it is his own,
small-minded prejudice that blinds him to the
anti-racist politics of the left. His ugly
message is now being loudly amplified by a
corporate media keen to use any weapon it can,
antisemitism included, to keep Corbyn and the
left out of power – and preserve a status quo
that benefits the few at the expense of the
many.
Jonathan Cook
is a Nazareth- based journalist and
winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism. No one pays him to write
these blog posts. If you appreciated it, please
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