In declaring their support for Zionism, the three
contenders for Corbyn’s crown are offering only the
cynical politics of old
By Jonathan CookFebruary 22, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
In recent years the British Labour party has grown
rapidly to become
one of the largest political movement in Europe,
numbering
more than half a million members, many of them
young people who had previously turned their backs
on national politics.
The reason was simple: a
new leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, had shown that it was possible to
rise to the top of a major party without being
forced to sacrifice one’s principles along the way
and become just another
machine politician.
Politics of cynicism
But as Corbyn prepares to
step down after a devastating election defeat,
statements by the three contenders,
Lisa Nandy, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Keir Starmer,
for his crown suggest that his efforts to reinvent
Labour as a mass, grassroots movement are quickly
unravelling. A politics of cynicism – dressed only
loosely in progressive garb - has returned to
replace Corbyn's popular democratic socialism.
Leadership candidates are once again carefully
cultivating their image and opinions – along with
their hairstyles, clothes and accents – to satisfy
the orthodoxies they fear will be rigidly enforced
by a billionaire-owned media and party bureaucrats.
Labour’s lengthy
voting procedure for a new leader begins this
weekend, with the winner announced in early April.
But whoever takes over the party reins, the most
likely outcome will be a revival of deep
disillusionment with British politics on the left.
The low-point of the candidates' campaigning, and
their betrayal of the movement that propelled Corbyn
on to the national stage, came last week at a
"hustings" jointly organised by the Jewish
Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. These
two party organisations are
cheerleaders for Israel, even as it
prepares to annex much of the West Bank,
supported by the Trump administration, in an attempt
to crush any hope of a Palestinian state ever being
established.
Leadership candidates are once again carefully cultivating their image and opinions – along with their hairstyles, clothes and accents – to satisfy the orthodoxies they fear will be rigidly enforced by a billionaire-owned media and party bureaucrats.
Labour’s lengthy voting procedure for a new leader begins this weekend, with the winner announced in early April. But whoever takes over the party reins, the most likely outcome will be a revival of deep disillusionment with British politics on the left.
The low-point of the candidates' campaigning, and their betrayal of the movement that propelled Corbyn on to the national stage, came last week at a "hustings" jointly organised by the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. These two party organisations are cheerleaders for Israel, even as it prepares to annex much of the West Bank, supported by the Trump administration, in an attempt to crush any hope of a Palestinian state ever being established.
Asked if they were Zionists, two of the candidates –
Nandy, the climate change secretary, and
Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, who is
widely touted as representing
"continuity Corbynism" –
declared they indeed were.
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The third candidate – Keir Starmer, the shadow
Brexit secretary, and the man favoured by the party
machine –
stated only slightly less emphatically that he
supported Zionism.
Nandy’s response was particularly baffling. She
is the
current chair of Labour Friends of Palestine,
while the other two are supporters of the group. It
is exceedingly difficult to find a Palestinian
Zionist. And yet the Palestinian cause is now
officially represented in the Labour parliamentary
party by someone who has declared herself a Zionist.
Ethnic politics
This is no small matter. For good reason, Zionism
is rarely defined beyond the vaguest sentiment about
creating a safe haven for Jews following the Nazi
genocide committed in Europe. Zionism’s political
implications are little understood or analysed, even
by many who subscribe to it. By the standards of
modern politics, it is an extremist ideology.
For decades western states have preferred to
promote an inclusive, civic nationalism that
embraces people for where they live, not who they
are. Zionism, by contrast, is
diametrically opposed to the civic
nationalism that is the basis of modern liberal
democracies.
Rather, it is an ethnic nationalism that confers
rights on people based on their blood ties or tribal
identity. Such nationalisms were at the root of a
divisive
European racial politics in the first half of
the last century that
led to two cataclysmic world wars and the
Holocaust.
In the Middle East, Zionism has fuelled a racial
politics that was once familiar across Europe. It
has rationalised the mass dispossession of the
Palestinians of their homeland through ethnic
cleansing and illegal settlement-building. It has
also conferred superior rights on Jews, turning
Palestinians into an ethnic underclass – segregated
from Jews – both inside Israel and in the occupied
territories.
'Clash of civilisations'
Progressive post-war politics of the kind one
might assume the Labour party should uphold has
sought to rid the West of the menace of ethnic
nationalism. It is true that
race politics is reviving at the moment in the
US and parts of Europe, under figures such as Donald
Trump, Boris Johnson and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. But
ethnic nationalism is – and always has been – the
preserve of right-wing, authoritarian politicians.
It should be an abhorrence to the left, which
subscribes to universal rights, opposes racism and
promotes principles of equality. But Labour
politicians have
long made an exception of Israel and Zionism.
Originally, that blind spot was
fuelled by a mix of Holocaust guilt and a
starry-eyed excitement over Israel’s brief
experiments with socialist-inspired – though
exclusively Jewish – collectivist agricultural
communities like the kibbutz, built on stolen
Palestinian land.
Then, as Labour fully abandoned socialism,
culminating in its reinvention as New Labour under
Tony Blair in the 1990s, the party began to champion
Israel for additional, even more cynical reasons. Labour
leaders
dressed up colonial ideas – of projecting
western power into the oil-rich Middle East – in
modern attire, as a supposed
Judeo-Christian "clash of civilisations" against
Islam in which Israel was on "our" side.
Pilloried by media
Corbyn never accepted the exception made for
Israel. Consistent with his universalist principles,
he long
championed the Palestinian cause as an enduring
colonial injustice,
instituted by the British government more than a
century ago with
the Balfour Declaration.
It is worth recalling, after years of being
pilloried by
a hostile media, the wider reasons why Corbyn
was unexpectedly and
twice elected by an overwhelming majority of
Labour members – and why that provoked such a
backlash. Decades on the backbenches – choosing to
represent the concerns of ordinary people – had made
it clear Corbyn would not pander to establishment
interests.
His track record on offering the right answers to
the great questions of the day spoke for itself,
from
decrying South African apartheid in the early
1980s to
opposing Britain’s leading role in the 2003 war
of aggression against Iraq.
He refused to bow to neoliberal orthodoxies,
including the “too big to fail” rationalisations for
the bank bailouts of 2008, that nearly bankrupted
the global economy. He had long campaigned a more
equitable society, and one accountable to working
people rather than inherited wealth and a
self-serving corporate elite.
He was genuinely anti-racist, but not in the
usual lip-service way. He cared about all oppressed
people whatever their skin colour and wherever they
lived on the planet, not just those that might vote
for him or his party in a UK election. For that
reason he was also fiercely against the legacy of
western colonialism and its endless resource wars
against the global south. He had long been a
prominent figure in the
Stop the War movement.
But equally, though it did not fit the narrative
that was being crafted against him and so was
ignored, he had been
a committed supporter of Jewish causes and his
Jewish constituents throughout his career on the
backbenches.
Campaign of smears
In declaring their support for Zionism – or
worse, saying they were Zionists – Long-Bailey,
Nandy and Starmer betrayed the left.
They did so at a time when the foundations of the
explicit racism of the resurgent right needs
confronting and challenging, not accommodating.
After all,
the white supremacists who are the key to this
resurgence are also among the biggest supporters of
Israel and Zonism.
Everyone understands why the three candidates
signed up enthusiastically as Zionists at the Jewish
Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel’s
hustings. They have watched Corbyn slowly destroyed
by
a four-year campaign of smears promoted by these
two groups – and echoed by the corporate media –
claiming the party has become “institutionally
antisemitic” on his watch.
Each candidate has faced demands that they
distance themselves from Corbyn. That culminated
last month in
an ultimatum from the Board of Deputies of
British Jews that they sign
"10 pledges" or face the same onslaught Corbyn
was subjected to.
The pledges
The 10 commitments are designed to ensure that
successful moves made in the Labour Party by the
board and the Jewish Labour Movement to redefine
antisemitism will become irreversible. That is
because the pledges also make these two Israel
advocacy groups judge and jury in Labour’s
antisemitism cases.
They have already foisted on the party a
retrograde and ahistorical definition of
antisemitism –
formulated by the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance – that is specifically designed
to ring-fence Zionism from any debate about what it
means as an ideology.
It shifts the focus of antisemitism from a hatred
of Jews to strong criticism of Israel. Seven of the
IHRA’s 11 examples of antisemitism refer to
Israel, including this one: “Claiming that the
existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour".
And yet the Zionist movement designed Israel to
be a racist state – one that privileged Jewish
immigrants to Palestine over the native Palestinian
population. And if that wasn’t clear from its
founding as an ethnic nationalist “Jewish state” on
the Palestinians’ homeland, it was made explicit two
years ago when those
founding principles were set out in a Basic Law.
That law
defines Israel as the “nation-state of the
Jewish people” – that is, all Jews around the world,
rather than the people who live in its territory,
including a fifth of the population who are
Palestinian by heritage.
Executioner-in-waiting
The three leadership candidates all hurried to
back
the Board of Deputies’ pledges. But these 10
commitments do more than just make serious criticism
of Israel off-limits. They create a self-rationalising
system that stretches the idea of antisemitism well
beyond what should be its breaking point.
Under these new terms, anyone can be
automatically denounced as an antisemite if they try
to challenge the changed definition of antisemitism
to include criticism of Israel, or if they
acknowledge that a pro-Israel lobby exists. In fact,
this was exactly why
Chris Williamson, an MP close to Corbyn, was
expelled from the party last year.
How McCarthyite this has become was again
illustrated this week when a candidate for Labour’s
National Executive Committee (NEC) elections, Graham
Durham, was
suspended for antisemitism over comments in
which he accused Long-Bailey of "cuddling up to the
Jewish Labour Movement and the chief rabbi, a
well-known Tory.”
As explained here, Durham’s "antisemitic" comment
was barely more than a statement of fact. It
included an additional reference to
the efforts of Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim
Mirvis, a public supporter of Boris Johnson, to
damage Corbyn’s chances in the run-up to December’s
general election by accusing the Labour leader of
being an antisemite.
The decision by Long-Bailey and the other two
candidates to back the Board’s pledges has
effectively turned the pro-Israel lobby into an
executioner-in-waiting. It empowers these groups to
destroy any of one of them who becomes leader and
tries to promote a Corbyn-style progressive
platform.
Two parties of capital
Neither the Board nor the JLM could have imposed
these demands on Labour in a vacuum. It would not
have been possible without the support both of a
corporate media that wishes Labour cowed and of the
Labour bureaucracy, which wants the status
quo-embracing, Blairite wing of the party back in
charge, even if that means alienating a large
section of the new membership.
For all three – the Israel lobby, the media and
the party machine – the goal is to have a Labour
leader once again entirely beholden to the current
western economic and imperialist order. A candidate
who will once again commit to business as usual and
ensure voters are offered a choice limited to two
parties of capital.
And the simplest and most double-dealing way to
achieve that end is by holding the antisemitism
sword over their heads. Corbyn could not be tamed so
he had to be destroyed. His successors have already
demonstrated how ready they are to be brought to
heel as the price for being allowed near power.
At another hustings, this time staged by the BBC,
all three candidates
agreed that their top priority, were they to
become party leader, would be to tackle Labour’s
supposed “antisemitism crisis”. That’s right – the
top priority. Not changing the public discourse on
austerity, or exposing the Tory government’s
incompetence and its catastrophic version of a hard
Brexit, or raising consciousness about an impending
climate catastrophe.
Or tackling the rising tide of racism in British
society, most obviously targeting Muslims, that is
being fomented by the right.
No, the priority for all three is enforcing a
so-called “zero tolerance” policy on antisemitism.
In practice, that would mean a presumption of guilt
and a fast-track expulsion of members accused of
antisemitism – as recently redefined to include
anything but softball criticism of Israel.
Approval of eugenics
It hardly bears
repeating – so hard-set is the media narrative
of an
"institutionally antisemitic" Labour party –
that there is
a complete absence of evidence, beyond the
anecdotal, to support the so-called "crisis".
Much less than
0.1 percent of members have been found guilty of
antisemitism even given the new, much-expanded
definition designed to entrap anti-racists who
criticise Israel or question the good faith of the
pro-Israel lobby. That is far less than the
prevalence of old-school antisemitism – the kind
that targets Jews for being Jews – found in the
wider British population or in the Conservative
Party, where all types of
racism are publicly indulged.
So confident is Boris Johnson’s government that
it won’t suffer Corbyn’s fate, either from the media
or from pro-Israel lobby groups, that this week it
stood by an adviser who was
revealed to have approved of eugenics and argued
that black people have lower IQs. Notably, Andrew
Sabisky was not sacked by the party after his views
were outed. He stepped down to avoid becoming a
"distraction".
Nor were there headlines that his employment by
Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, proved
the Conservative Party was "institutionally racist".
In fact, Sabisky’s worldview has
become increasingly mainstream in the Tory party
as it lurches rightwards.
Subversion from within
Conversely, though rarely mentioned by the media,
several prominent incidents of antisemitism in
Labour that
caused problems for Corbyn relate to Jews and
Jewish party members who are staunch critics of
Israel or
define themselves as anti-Zionists.
There has been little attention paid to the
prejudice faced by these Jews, who have set up a
group inside the party called
Jewish Voice for Labour to counter the
disinformation. It has been maligned and ignored in
almost equal measure.
These Jewish party members who support Corbyn are
regularly dismissed as the "wrong kind of Jews" –
paradoxically, an example of real antisemitism that
those peddling
the antisemitism smears against Labour have
depended on to maintain the credibility of their
claims.
Also unreported by the British media is the
documented role of the party’s pro-Israel partisans
in the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of
Israel in seeking to foment a revolt against Corbyn
–
filmed by an undercover reporter for Al-Jazeera
– over his strong support for the Palestinian cause.
This incontrovertible evidence of efforts to
subvert the party from within has been ignored by
Labour Party bureaucrats too. The assumption of some
who bought into the antisemitism “crisis” was that
once the Labour party was rid of Corbyn the smears
would fizzle out. They would become unnecessary. But
that was to misunderstand what was at stake and what
role the accusations served.
The antisemitism allegations were never really
about antisemitism, except presumably in the minds
of some members of the Jewish community whose
perceptions of events were inevitably skewed by the
media coverage and the hostility from Jewish
leadership organisations that have made Israel their
chief cause.
Weaponising antisemitism
Antisemitism was a tool – one for preventing
Corbyn from reaching power and threatening the
interests of the ruling elite. His opponents – in
the media, inside his own party and among pro-Israel
groups – chose antisemitism as the battlefield
because it is much easier to defeat a principled
opponent in a dirty war than in a fair fight.
Antisemitism served a purpose and continues to do
so. In Corbyn’s case, it tarnished him and his
general policies by turning reality on its head and
making him out to be a racist posing as an
anti-racist.
Now the same allegations can be used as a stick
to tame his successor. Antisemitism can be wielded
as threat to make sure none contemplates following
his path into a principled, grassroots politics that
champions the weak over the powerful, the poor over
the fabulously wealthy.
This week the antisemitism
allegations surfaced again in a leadership TV
debate staged by Channel 4.
Perhaps aware of how craven they risk appearing
by backing Israel and Zionism so enthusiastically,
and of how many party members may conclude that the
Palestinians are being thrown under the proverbial
bus, all three stated that there was no
contradiction between opposing antisemitism and
standing up for Palestinian rights.
In theory that is true. But it is no longer true
in the case of Long-Bailey, Nandy and Starmer. They
have accepted the ugly, false premises of the
pro-Israel lobby, which require one to make just
such a choice.
The lobby requires that, like the candidates, one
must declare one’s support for Zionism, and Israel
as a Jewish state, or be denounced as an antisemite.
This is the flipside of the mischievous conflation
of anti-Zionism – opposition to a political ideology
– with antisemitism – hatred of Jews.
That conflation is based on the quite obviously
false assertion that Israel represents all Jews,
that it speaks for all Jews and that its actions –
including its war crimes against the Palestinians –
are the responsibility of all Jews. The pro-Israel
lobby’s intentional conflation is not only deeply
problematic, it is deeply antisemitic.
A choice must be made
One cannot stand up for a Palestinian right to
self-determination while also embracing a political
ideology, Zionism, that over more than 70 years, and
as shared by every shade of Israeli government, has
worked tirelessly to deny the Palestinians that
right.
The fact that so many people in the West – Jews
and non-Jews alike – have for so long evaded making
that choice does not alter the fact that a choice
has to be made. The lobby has made its choice. And
now it has forced the Labour Party’s leadership
candidates – as it tried to force Corbyn himself –
into making the same choice.
The next leader of the Labour Party is already a
prisoner to the “institutional antisemitism”
narrative. That means their hands are chained not
only to support for Israel, but to the reactionary
politics in which Israel as a Jewish state makes
sense – a worldview that embraces its style of
ethnic, chauvinist, militaristic, segregationist
politics.
A world, in fact, not so unlike the one we are
being driven towards by the right-wing parties of
Europe and the US.
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 consider
visiting his website and make a donation to support
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