Anti-Semitism Threats Will Keep Destroying Labour Party
February 17, 2020 Save
Jonathan Cook says the fear of being smeared helped the Blairite wing gain
control and will lead, as intended, to political and economic timidity from the
next leader.
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
If there is one issue that denotes the terminal decline of the U.K.’s Labour
Party as a force for change – desperately needed social, economic and
environmental change – it is not Brexit. It is the constant furor over an
“anti-Semitism crisis” supposedly plaguing the party for the past five years.
The imminent departure of Jeremy Corbyn as leader will not end the damage that
has been done to Labour by such claims. Soon Brexit will become a messy fait
accompli. But the shadow of Labour’s “anti-Semitism problem” will loom over it
darkly for the foreseeable future, making sure that Corbyn’s successor dare not
incur the same steep price for pursuing a radical political program. The fear
of being smeared as an anti-Semite will lead, as it was meant to do, to
political and economic timidity from whoever takes on the mantle of leader.
In fact, as we shall examine in detail in a moment, the candidates for the
Labour leadership are demonstrating just how cowed they already are. But first
let’s recap on how we got to the current situation.
Led into a Trap
Personifying the political paranoia that now grips Labour is the party’s
one-time wunderkind, Owen Jones – possibly the only early champion of Corbyn in
the corporate media. He used his Guardian column to fight back against the
first wave of slurs – that Corbyn was unpatriotic, unstatesmanlike, a former
Soviet spy, and so on.
Owen Jones in 2013. (Policy Exchange, Flickr)
But then, as the smears failed to inflict significant damage on Corbyn, a
second line of attack was pursued. It claimed that Corbyn’s lifelong and very
prominent activism as an anti-racist was in fact a cover story. Depending on
who was spinning the narrative, Corbyn was either a secret Jew hater or a man
who endlessly indulged anti-Semitism within his inner circle and in the wider
party. Jones’s colleagues at The Guardian joined the rest of the corporate
media mob in baying for Corbyn’s blood. Long wedded to a rigid form of identity
politics, Jones was soon publicly wavering in his support for Corbyn. Then, as
an election neared in 2017, he abandoned him entirely.
Unfortunately for the corporate media, the election result did not follow their
shared predictions. Far from presiding over an unprecedented electoral
disaster, Corbyn came within a hair’s breadth of overturning the Tory
parliamentary majority. He also increased the party’s share of the vote by the
largest margin of any post-war Labour leader. Jones changed his tune once
again, promising to be more wary of the group-think of his corporate media
colleagues. Of course, his new-found resolution soon crumbled.
Like a mouse chasing the scent of cheese, Jones headed into the trap set for
him. He refused to accuse Corbyn himself of anti-Semitism, unlike many of his
colleagues. Instead he gave his blessing each time a Labour activist was
targeted as an anti-Semite – oftentimes, over their support for Palestinian
rights.
Forced onto Back Foot
As the media attacks on Labour for supposedly welcoming anti-Semites into the
party’s ranks intensified (flying in the face of all the evidence), Jones
acquiesced – either actively or through his silence – in the resulting wave of
suspensions and expulsions, even of Jewish members who were hounded out for
being too critical of Israel. Jones’s hands may have looked personally clean
but he acted as lookout for those, like Labour MP Jess Phillips, who were
determined to carry out their promise to “knife Corbyn in the front.”
Undoubtedly, the polarized debate about Brexit – and the increasingly unhinged
atmosphere it produced – was the main reason Corbyn crashed in December’s
election. But the confected “anti-Semitism row” played a very significant
supporting role. The disastrous consequences of that row are still very much
being felt, as Labour prepares to find a new leader.
The issue of anti-Semitism was probably not much of a priority for most voters,
especially when the examples cited so often seemed to be about a state, Israel,
rather than Jews. Nonetheless, the smears against Corbyn gradually undermined
him, even among supporters.
As has been noted here and elsewhere, the anti-Semitism furor served chiefly as
a shadow war that obscured much deeper, internal ideological divisions.
Polarization over whether Labour was convulsed by anti-Semitism concealed the
real struggle, which was over where the party should head next and who should
lead it there.
The party’s Blairite faction – supporters of the former centrist leader Tony
Blair – knew that they could not win a straight fight on ideological issues
against Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of members who supported him. The
Blairites’ middle-of-the-road, status-quo-embracing triangulation now found
little favor with voters. But the Blairites could discredit and weaken Corbyn
by highlighting an “anti-Semitism crisis” he had supposedly provoked in Labour
by promoting Palestinian rights and refusing to cheerlead Israel, as the
Blairites had always done. Identity politics, the Blairites quickly concluded,
was the ground that they could weaponize against him.
As a result, Corbyn was forced endlessly on to the back foot, unable to advance
popular leftwing policies because the anti-Semitism smears sucked all oxygen
out of the room. Think of Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Neil shortly before
the December election. Not only did Corbyn not get a chance to explain the
party’s progressive platform to floating voters, but much worse he was forced
into abandoning the very personal traits – openness, honesty, modesty – that
had made him unexpectedly popular in the 2017 election. Accusations of
anti-Semitism – like those of being a wife-beater – are impossible to face down
in TV soundbites. Corbyn was left looking evasive, shifty and out of touch.
Vicious Spiral
These confrontations over an “anti-Semitism problem” in Labour – repeated every
time Corbyn gave an interview – also helped to make him look feeble. It was a
winning formula: his constant apologies for a supposed “plague of
anti-Semitism” in Labour (for which there was no evidence) suggested to voters
that Corbyn was incapable of exercising control over his party. If he failed in
this simple task, they concluded, how could he be trusted to deal with the
complexities of running a country?
The smears isolated him within Labour too. His few prominent allies on the
left, such as Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson, were improbably picked off
as anti-Semites, while others went to ground for fear of being attacked too. It
was this isolation that forced Corbyn to make constant and damaging compromises
with the Blairites, such as agreeing to a second referendum on Brexit. And in a
vicious spiral, the more he compromised, the more he looked weak, the more his
polling numbers fell, the more he compromised.
All of this was happening in plain view. If the rest of us could see it, so
could Owen Jones. And so, of course, could those who are now standing for
election to become the next leader of the Labour party. All of them learnt the
lessons they were supposed to draw from the party’s “antisemitism crisis”.
Three Lessons
No. 1: Some crises can be engineered without the need for evidence. And smears
can be much more damaging than facts – at least, when the corporate media
builds a consensus around them – because the fightback cannot be won or lost on
the battlefield of evidence. Indeed, facts become irrelevant. It is about who
has the biggest and best battalion of propagandists. And the simple truth is
that the billionaires who own the corporate media can buy the most skilled
propagandists and can buy the largest platforms to spread their misinformation.
No. 2: Even if anti-Semitism is of peripheral interest to most voters –
especially when the allegations concern contested “tropes”, often about Israel
rather than Jews – claims of such can still inflict serious damage on a party
and its leader. Voters judge a party leader on how they respond to such
accusations, especially if they are made to look weak or untrustworthy. And as
there is no good way to face down wall-to-wall accusations of anti-Semitism
from the media, however confected, it is wise not to get drawn into this
particular, unwinnable fight.
No. 3: The British ruling class does not especially care about anti-Semitism,
or any other form of racism. The Establishment uses its power to uphold class
privilege, not to promote equality, after all. But that does not mean it has no
interest in anti-Semitism. As with its support for a more general identity
politics, the ruling class knows that anti-Semitism has instrumental uses – it
can be exploited to manipulate public discourse and deflect ordinary people
from a powerful class struggle into divisive identity and culture wars.
Therefore, any Labour leader who wants to engage in the politics of class
struggle – a struggle against the billionaire class – is going to face not a
fair fight on the terrain of their choosing but a dirty war on the terrain
chosen by the billionaires.
10 Diktats
Labour’s leadership challengers learnt those lessons so well because they
watched for five years as Corbyn sank ever further into the mire of the
anti-Semitism smears. So when the deeply Conservative (with a capital C) Board
of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) issued a diktat to the candidates last month
veiled as “10 Pledges to End the Antisemitism Crisis” they all hurried to sign
up, without bothering to read the small print.
The Board’s 10 points were effectively its red lines. Overstep the mark on any
one of them, the Board warned the leadership contestants, and we will lend our
considerable credibility to a corporate media campaign to smear you and the
party as anti-Semitic. You will become Corbyn Mark II, and face the same fate.
The 10 demands have one purpose only. Once accepted, and all the candidates
have accepted them, the pledges ensure that the board – and what it defines as
the Jewish community’s “main representative groups” – will enjoy an exclusive
and incontestable right to decide what is antisemitic, as well as who is
allowed to remain in the Labour party and who must be removed.
The pledges create a division of labor between the Board and the Jewish Labour
Movement (JLM), a small faction in Labour of Jews and non-Jews who are vocal
advocates for Israel. First, the board stands surely, supposedly on behalf of
Britain’s Jews, for the credibility of the highly controversial redefinition of
anti-Semitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(IHRA). Seven of its 11 examples of anti-Semitism refer to Israel, not hatred
of Jews. Then, the JLM’s task is to enforce the IHRA definition, identifying
which party members are anti-Semites and determining their fate: either
contrition and re-education or expulsion.
Judge & Jury
The 10 Pledges are actually part of a campaign by Jewish leadership groups like
the board to pervert a well-established principle regulating investigations
into racism. The board and JLM have regularly cited the so-called Macpherson
principle, derived from a judicial inquiry into the failings in the 1990s of an
institutionally racist British police force as it investigated the murder of a
black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.
The Guardian has been among those peddling the board and the JLM’s mischievous
reinterpretation of that principle to suggest that an incident is defined as
racist if the victim perceives it to be racist. Therefore, Jews – or in this
case, “representative” Jewish organizations like the board – get to decide
exclusively whether Labour has an anti-Semitism problem and how it manifests
itself – for example, by criticizing Israel.
Except that is not what Sir William Macpherson decided at all. His principle
was simply that institutions like the police were under an obligation to
investigate incidents as racist in nature if that is what the victim believed
them to be. In other words, Macpherson called on institutions to listen to
victims and to take account of the victims’ interpretation of an event.
Very obviously, he did not argue that anyone accused of racism was guilty of
it, or that anyone making an accusation of racism must be believed. The
accusation had to be investigated on the assumption of racism until the
evidence proved whether the accusation was true or not, and whether or not it
was motivated by racism.
Further, while the Macpherson principle called for the victim to be given a
fair hearing about how they perceived an incident, the board and the JLM do not
want simply to be heard. The 10 Pledges demand that these organizations alone
decide what is anti-Semitism and who is guilty – that they act as judge and
jury.
And Not Only That
The Board and the JLM also demand an exclusive prerogative to define
anti-Semitism as a new kind of racism – almost unheard of a decade or more ago
– that may have nothing to do with hatred or fear of Jews, as it was once
defined. The board and the JLM insist Labour adopt a patently ridiculous – and
overtly anti-Semitic – position that treats many kinds of criticism of Israel
as anti-Semitic because, they argue, Israel represents all Jews. An attack on
Israel therefore amounts to an attack on Jews and their identity. (The board’s
argument is itself anti-Semitic because it requires us to hold all Jews, not
just the Israeli government, responsible for Israel’s actions, including its
documented war crimes against Palestinians.)
Circular Proof
But the problem with the 10 Pledges runs deeper still. The intended effect of
the pledges in their entirety is to create a circular, self-reinforcing proof
of anti-Semitism against anyone who dares to disagree with the board and the
JLM. In other times, such circular proofs have been identified for what they
are: as witch-hunts and McCarthyism.
The board not only intends to silence any non-Jews who disagree with its views
on anti-Semitism and Israel, but it also insists on denying a voice to any Jews
or Jewish organizations that disagree with it. According to Pledge 8, all
Jewish “fringe organisations and individuals” are denied any say on what
constitutes anti-Semitism. Why are they “fringe?” Because they disagree with
the Board of Deputies’ definition of antisemitism.
Several writers have noted that the Board’s claim to be “representative” of the
“Jewish community” is entirely bogus. It can claim only to be representative of
those parts of the 280,000-strong Jewish community it seeks to represent. That
amounts to no more than the 56 per cent of Jewish households who belong to a
synagogue. These are the most conservative elements of a wider Jewish
community. Surveys show that for many years, and long before Corbyn became
leader, the vast majority of this section of the Jewish community – those the
Board represents – vote for the Conservative party in elections. They also
identify very strongly with Israel – and seemingly whatever its does in terms
of violating Palestinian rights.
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The board’s very function is to sideline the 44 percent of Jews it does not
represent – including secular, socialist and anti-Zionist Jews – as not really
belonging to the “Jewish community.” It thereby silences their views. As Jo
Sutton-Klein observes, “While the [Jewish organizational] establishment can’t
un-Jewish any person or community, they can invalidate their Jewishness if they
decide that their opinions are no longer kosher.” That is precisely what the
Board has sought to achieve with its 10 Pledges.
But if the board’s representative status is highly doubtful, the Jewish Labour
Movement’s is even more so. In fact, there is plenty of evidence – including
from a 2017 documentary filmed by an undercover reporter for Al Jazeera – that
the JLM was a dormant organization until 2015. As an investigation by
journalist Asa Winstanley discovered, it was refounded specifically to bring
down Corbyn shortly after he won the leadership election.
The JLM was apparently afraid of what Corbyn’s support for the Palestinians
might entail for Israel. While claiming to represent Jewish interests in the
Labour Party, it excludes from membership any Jews who are not Zionist – that
is, enthusiastic supporters of Israel.
That should not be surprising. The JLM was originally an ideological offshoot
of the Israeli Labour Party, which oversaw the ethnic cleansing of 750,000
Palestinians from their homeland in 1948, launched the first settlements in the
territories it occupied in 1967, and created a system of severe
institutionalized racial discrimination against Israel’s large non-Jewish
population, its Palestinian citizens. Despite proclaiming its leftwing
credentials, the JLM’s ideological outlook closely mirrors the ethnic
supremacist worldview of the Israeli Labour Party.
The JLM lacks transparency, but most estimates are that its membership numbers
are in triple digits, even after it has allowed non-Jews and non-Labour members
to join.
‘Wrong Kind of Jew’
In fact, there is no reason to believe the JLM is any less fringe – and
probably more so – than Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), a group of Jewish Labour
party members who created the organization to support Corbyn and counter the
JLM’s claims that it spoke for Jews in the Labour Party.
As I have pointed out many times before, the board’s position that it alone
gets to decide which Jews count is not only deeply ugly but also anti-Semitic.
It dismisses a whole swath of the Jewish community as the “wrong kind of Jews.”
It treats their views on the racism they face as of no value; and it strips
them of any agency inside the Labour Party, leaving the field clear to the JLM.
Instead of a necessary dialogue within the Jewish community about what
anti-Semitism means, the board confers on itself the right to oppress and
silence other groups of Jews who disagree with it.
There are two main reasons why the board wishes to turn these “fringe” groups
into outcasts, into political pariahs. First, their very existence reminds us
that this is a highly contested political debate, and one taking place inside
the Jewish community, about what Jewish identity is and whether Israel has a
place in that identity. But at the same time, the existence of socialist Jewish
groups like Jewish Voice for Labour also disrupts a narrative jointly promoted
by the board, the JLM and Labour’s Blairite faction to discredit the radical
social and economic programs of the left by entwining them with allegations of
anti-Semitism. Severe criticism of neoliberalism, it is implied, is of a piece
with severe criticism of Israel. Both are evidence of anti-Semitism.
The weaponizing by the Board and the JLM of the Macpherson principle is easily
exposed. This month Labour suspended Jo Bird reportedly over allegations of
anti-Semitism. Bird, who is openly anti-Zionist and on the left wing of the
party, had been the only Jewish candidate contesting Labour’s National
Executive Committee elections. She is the latest prominent left-wing Jewish
party member to have been targeted as an anti-Semite both for strongly
criticizing Israel and for challenging the Board and the JLM’s right to speak
for all British Jews.
How obscene this all is may be easier to grasp if we do a small thought
experiment. Imagine for a moment that a small group of black Labour Party
activists insist on the expulsion of other black party members as racists for
their opposition to an African state accused of war crimes. Would we be
comfortable with a largely white Labour Party bureaucracy adjudicating as a
matter of racism on what is clearly an ideological and political dispute within
the black community? Would we want to condone one black group stigmatizing
another group as racists to silence its political arguments? And would we be
happy to expel as racists white Labour Party members who sided with one black
group against the other in a political debate about an oppressive state?
Witchfinders
Which brings us back to Owen Jones. Last week Asa Winstanley – the
investigative reporter who has done more than anyone to expose what really lies
behind the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Corbyn – resigned from the
Labour Party. Like Jo Bird, he has found himself in hot water for questioning
the anti-Semitism narrative promoted by the board and the JLM. He wrote that he
had given up any hope of a fair hearing from party officials who say his
journalism championing justice for Palestinians and challenging the Israel
lobby’s role in the Labour Party amounts to anti-Semitism.
Jones, as ever, stood squarely with the witchfinders against Winstanley. He
argued, as he has done many times before, that is possible both to fight for
Palestinian rights and to fight against antisemitism.
Except Jones is plainly wrong – so long as we accede, as he has done, to the
Board and the JLM’s demand that anyone who goes further than the most softball
criticism of Israel must be defined either as an anti-Semite, like Winstanley,
or as the ‘wrong kind of Jew,’ like Bird.
If we are only allowed to gently chide Israel in ways that cannot meaningfully
advance Palestinian rights, if we are prevented from discussing the strategies
of staunchly pro-Israel lobbyists to silence Israel’s critics, if we are denied
the right to push for an international boycott of Israel of the kind that
helped blacks in South Africa end their own oppression, then nothing is going
to change for the Palestinians. If those are the unreasonable terms imposed on
us by the board, the JLM and Owen Jones, then no, we cannot do both. We must
choose.
The truth is that the support Owen Jones offers Palestinians is worthless. It
is no more than virtue signaling – because it is immediately negated by his
support for bodies like the JLM that actively terrorize party members,
including Jewish members, into silence on crucial debates about Palestinian
rights and about how we might deter Israel in future.
The reality is that, if Jewish organizations like the Board and the JLM choose
to put the Israeli state as it currently exists at the very heart of their
Jewish identity and make proper scrutiny of it off-limits, then they have also
chosen to make themselves complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian
people, made themselves opponents of peace in the Middle East, and have abetted
in the erosion of international law. And if we side with them, then we become
complicit too.
Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth.
This article is from his blog Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect
those of Consortium News.
