Review of "The Historical David: The Real Life of An Invented Hero" by Joel Baden

Easy to read, slightly repetitive book that aims to decode the Biblical narrative through the methods of text analysis...although the author knows about the archaeological evidence he doesn't go there much. Still, it's from a solid historical perspective, and doesn't do the daft "but what was David really like" stuff that some analysis of Biblical stories that some authors do.

Review of "The Oxford History of the Holy Land" by by Robert G. Hoyland (Editor), H. G. M Williamson (Editor)

 

A detailed, grown up sort of book with a lot of knowledge about history, scripture and theology. Not for the casual reader, I'd say, but no less enjoyable for that. Some discussion about whether the Abrahamic religions really have a place for "holy places" at all in their theologies, and perhaps not enough consideration as to whether the idea of a sacred location is really a hangover from previous non-monotheistic religions. 

Feeding the hand that bites us

Last weekend I attended some of the Festival of Commoning, held in Stroud. There were lots of interesting talks and discussions, but there was one particularly significant moment for me. Jem Bendell, famous as a guru of XR and Deep Adaption, was down to speak on “Great Reclamation”. In retrospect the title of his talk ought perhaps to have rung a few alarm bells, but it didn’t - one assumes that an event like this ought to be a relatively safe place. 

He didn’t talk about climate or deep adaptation at all - the focus of his talk was a call for restrictions on foreigners buying or owning land in Britain. I don’t have a very strong view on this. I’m aware that lots of other countries have such restrictions, and there’s room for a balanced, evidence-based discussion on what the impact might be on the affordability of homes in Britain.

The trouble was that the language that he used was very strongly reminiscent of that used by the far right. He talked about “globalists” and “international bankers”. He spoke about how these people were “sucking the life blood out of our country”, and he said that this was directly linked to “our” children deciding not to have babies. It was all rather “Great Replacement”, and the title may have been a deliberate referece - if it wasn’t, then it’s shocking that no-one noticed. (You can see a version of what he said on his blog here, and judge for yourself whether my reaction was justified).

So when it was time for questions and contributions, I stuck my hand up and pointed this out, saying that on a day when Tommy Robinson had brought 100.000 foot soldiers on to the streets of London, it was a bad day to be fooling around with economic nationalism. I said that “globalists” was often a dogwhistle for Jews, and that focusing on “foreign” ownership of property made it seem as if it was OK for the Duke of Westminster to own huge amounts of property in Britain because he was “one of us” - in Bendell’s word, a citizen.

It would have been easy for him to have agreed that the language was - on reflection - a bit unfortunate, and that it wasn’t his intention to align himself with the far right, but he didn’t. He doubled down, said that “globalists” were the source of the problem, and that the suggestion that he might be unconsciously echoing racist and antisemitic rhetoric was just the sort of thing he’d be expecting from “guilt-ridden Guardianistas”. 

Somebody else from the floor joined in, saying that his language was wrong and bad, and that it was of a piece with the sort of thing one heard from the US far right; rather wonderfully, that person turned out to be Carne Ross, the “accidental anarchist” and former diplomat who was one of the later celebrity speakers at the event. Someone else called out that next he would start talking about the Rothschilds. Still Bendell was having none of it; he was in sympathy with Black and Brown people who couldn’t afford housing, and that was down to the globalists.

The final contribution came from a local activist with whom I’ve had my disagreements who made a generous and kind closing remark about me personally, and about the importance of being careful about language.

Afterwards a few people spoke to me - some of the organisers of the festival, who said that I’d been right to bring it up, and that Jem Bendell didn’t really mean it, and we probably agreed. A couple of others said that they’d never heard that “globalist” and “cosmopolitan” were used code-words for Jew, and I perhaps unkindly replied that they ought to get out more.

I was pretty shaken by the experience, though the solidarity I received helped make it better. Reflecting later, I thought it would of course be easy for Jem Bendell to show that he wasn’t a racist. There’s no sign that he’s an antisemite either, in the sense of someone who hates Jews. Apart from a recent engagement with the cause of Palestine and Gaza, he’s not said or written anything touching on the subject.

I think that’s the point. Antisemitism isn’t a feeling (hate), it’s an ideology - one which puts Jews at the centre of explaining how the world works and what’s wrong with it. It’s possible, and even common, to spread this ideology without personally hating Jews, and even to do it in places where there aren’t many Jews. 

And what’s wrong with it isn’t only that it’s hurtful to actual Jewish people, but that it makes everyone else stupider, and less able to understand the world as it really is. That’s the point about the expression “the socialism of fools”. Antisemitism isn’t just something that is promoted by stupid people, but something that helps to make people stupider.

AFTERWORD: Jem Bendell wrote a response to this post, which is published here. Once again, I wish to make it clear that I am not accusing Jem Bendell of being an antisemite. You can judge for yourself whether the language he uses is helpful to other people who are.

Review of "Popular Resistance in Palestine A History of Hope and Empowerment" by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

I was disappointed and upset by this book. It's not specially well written, and it feels poorly edited too - sometimes the same episode is described twice, or the same point made, within a few pages. 

But that's not the main thing that's wrong with it. Its politics and its account of history are often really bad. The first four or so chapters are a "discussion" of the role of violence in struggles of resistance, but there's nothing remotely analytical about it. Sometimes the resistance (wherever) uses violence, and sometimes it doesn't. He's obviously keen not to be seen as criticising armed struggle, whether or not it's appropriate or effective. 

Worse, there's really no distinction between different kinds of armed-struggle tactics or strategies. Sure, the South African regime and its supporters called the ANC "terrorists", but for the most part its armed wing stayed away from indiscriminate attacks on civilians, focusing instead on infrastructure. Whereas the Palestinian armed struggle focused on soft Israeli targets, with lots of attacks on civilians - kidnappings, hostage taking, and exactly the kind of bombings and shootings that had earlier been deployed by the Irgun against Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. The question here is not the abstract "do Palestinians have the right to use violence" but what kind of violence should they use. For both Fatah and later Hamas, the rhetoric was revolutionary but the tactics were those of fascism.

After this there's a long chronological account of Palestinian resistance, beginning with the Ottoman period.  The Zionists start to arrive, but there's absolutely nothing about where they are coming from or why.  As with other Palestinian and Arab Nationalist accounts of "the Zionists" they are presented as pith-helmeted colonialists. There's no indication or reflection at all as to why Jews were leaving the Russian empire. Of course the Palestinians of the time can be forgiven for not thinking about that so much - something bad was beginning to happen to them, and they correctly understood that it was going to get worse. But someone now writing a history owes their readers something better.

This tendency is exacerbated in the history of the Mandate. By the time the book reaches the 1930s it acknowledges that the flow of Zionist immigrants is increasing, but there's absolutely no account as to why. The author manages to talk about the history of this period without mentioning antisemitism or the Nazis. The only mention of the Holocaust in the book is to illustrate a point about the bad education that Jewish children in Israel receive. There's nothing at all about who made up the wave of Jewish immigrants in the immediate post-WW2 period, or about the mass emigration of Jews from Arab countries that came after that. Again, it would contradict the view that "the Zionists" were all European and American colons.

When it gets to 1967 there's a brief mention of Ahmed Shukeiri, the Egyptian-backed first head of the PLO, though no mention of his call to throw the Jews into the sea or his promise that no Jews would survive the coming war.

Overall the history in the book is like a mirror image of the bad history that I received from my Zionist education. There's lots about the pro-Zionist sympathies of the British (we were only told about the bad period in which the British tried to restrict Zionist immigration, not the preceding 16 years in which they had enabled it), and then the Americans. There is of course nothing about the way in which the USSR and the international Communist movement acted as midwives for the birth of Israel, because that would contradict the narrative that Israel was a creation of imperialism. 

It's a shame, because somewhere in there there's a better book struggling and failing to get out.  There's a lot of good documentation about the popular non-violent struggle. The account of the post-1948 and then post-1967 resistance is informative and told me lots I didn't know. Somewhere in this period some good Israelis begin to appear, though without any discussion or reflection as to what that might mean. There's a little bit of an account of Palestinians who are prepared to accept a permanent presence for Israelis, though usually in terms of them being sell-outs. At one point he does actually quote with approval that "there's no place for a second nation in Palestine", though he is far from consistent about this.

I read this on a Kindle, so it's harder to illustrate this with quotes and excerpts. In a way I'd like to write more, because this is an important juncture in the evolution of my perspective on Israel-Palestine...listening to Palestinian voices, but then not finding them easy to listen to.

The far right under wraps

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So said Gramsci, and he might have been thinking about the strange conjuncture of the “Cosmic Right” - a blend of new age weirdness, alternative healing and wellness, and reactionary politics. 

Perhaps the seeds of this movement had been germinating out of sight for a while, but the first shoots became apparent with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. It began with “Stand in the park” protests against the lockdown restrictions, and soon there was a movement - or at least a series of Telegram channels and social media presences - with various names, including the Freedom Movement, the Sovereign Citizens Movement, the White Rose (named after the German resistance to the Nazis). 

And there was The Light, a free newspaper full of anti-vaccination misinformation, anxiety-inducing material about radio waves and surveillance by the state and big tech, and a ragbag of other conspiracy theories.

It’s hard to overstate how horrible The Light is. It contains sympathetic articles by and about figures from the traditional far right, like Anne Marie Waters of “For Britain” and “Pegida UK” - who in turn uses the paper as a platform to praise Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League. Another regular contributor is Niall McCrae, a former lecturer involved in far right organisation Hearts of Oak, with Tommy Robinson. McCrae has co-authored with Robin Tilbrook, the founder of the far right “English Democrats” party, originally known as the English National Party. There are articles in defence of Holocaust denial and supporting the genocidal antisemite Graham Hart. 

There’s homophobia and transphobia, and misinformation about sex education in schools. There are attacks on feminism, women’s equality, contraception and abortion rights, and the claim that there is a “war on masculinity”. 

And there is a relentless promotion of climate change denial and obfuscation, alongside attacks on environmentalists and especially on any restrictions on car use. 

The themes in the paper are picked up by an emerging street movement. There are rallies with speakers whose websites feature antisemitic material drawn from “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion” and conspiracy-laden accounts of the toothless United Nations sustainability initiative Agenda 2030. In towns across the UK, and now in Ireland, there are weekly stalls distributing the paper as well as other books and pamphlets. There is a strong presence in several towns in the South West, and the paper has been spotted in London and in towns in the North. 

Groups of protestors converged on Oxford to protest against traffic calming schemes and “Fifteen Minute Cities”, another well-intentioned town planning idea about localisation of services that is characterised as a plan to create urban ghettos in which citizens will be confined. A mob of ‘conspiraloons’ stormed a meeting of Glastonbury Town Council and then crowed that it had forced the administration - the equivalent of a parish council, with few powers - to abandon its non-existent plans for a fifteen-minute city.

What is this?

For some, this phenomenon is both unprecedented and confusing. Sure, the movement’s messages seem to come from the right, but its cultural style doesn’t. The people who hand out The Light look like hippies. The material often has an anti-corporate or Trump-style “workerist” slant to it, with lashings of libertarianism. In our little town of Stroud, where the movement has gained a foothold among wellness practitioners and some members of the Steiner community, the most prominent supporters are ex-socialists and environmental activists. Some continue to wear Jeremy Corbyn t-shirts and loudly profess themselves to be socialists. The Light’s editor (a flat-earther) began his involvement in politics as an anti-fracking campaigner. 

So a new description and analysis is proposed to explain what’s going on. Unsurprisingly some commentators revive the vapid “horseshoe theory”. Others have coined the term “diagonalism” to characterise the leftists who turn right, and this seems to have struck a chord in Germany (as Querdenker), where the pandemic and anti-vaxx activism created a steady pipeline from the Greens and Die Linke to the AfD.

Naomi Klein, in her recent perceptive book Doppelganger, prefers to talk about the “mirror world”, in which rightwing politicians pick up on areas of anxiety that the left has either ignored or lost its interest - technological surveillance, the failings of the medical-industrial complex, the capture of international organisations by mega-corporations, the hypocrisy of the liberal elite and its techno-fixes for profound systemic failures…

I’m not so sure that what we’re looking at is so unprecedented. When “classic” fascism first arrived, in Italy in the early 1920s, some people on the left were confused. Fascism was against traditional conservatives and institutions, against laissez faire and free market economics. It presented itself as a “third way”, modernising, beyond traditional conservatism and socialism, and it was in favour of a great deal of state direction of the economy and society - unlike traditional conservatives. 

Mussolini’s movement in Italy recruited syndicalists and anarchists as well as nationalists. Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was preceded by his “New Party” which attracted former members of the left-wing Independent Labour Party, and a few stayed the course with the later incarnation as fully fledged fascists. Despite his enthusiasm for the British Empire and colonial wars, Mosley was a campaigner for “peace” in the later 1930s, opposing any kind of confrontation with Europe’s Nazi and fascist regimes. Our new rightists are keen to advocate for peace with Putin.

In Germany there were so-called “Beefsteak Nazis”, allegedly brown on the outside but red on the inside. Fabians like George Bernard Shaw admired Mussolini’s hostility to Italy’s liberal institutions. Mainstream social democrats like Henri de Man in Belgium openly embraced fascism.

It’s a defining feature of the far right that it presents itself as against the system. Whereas the mainstream right says that the system is under threat and needs to be defended, the far right says that the system has already been conquered by those it defines as enemies, and it needs to be taken back so that the natural order of things can be restored. So they might be revolutionaries, but they want a revolution that will reimpose hierarchy and inequality.

This can get very weird. In the US the QAnon movement and its wider circle of alt-right militant Trump supporters, which talked a lot about the elites and the ‘deep state’, hoped for a military coup to restore the constitution and Trump to the presidency. It is quite alarming to see Free Alex Jones Tee-shirts on the High Street in Stroud.

So the far right will sometimes be hostile to the same things that the left opposes - but this doesn’t really mean that we share common ground. They are hostile to the banking system, but this hostility is grounded in a racialised understanding of financial institutions (“controlled by Jews”). They are hostile to the international organisations intended to ameliorate the worst aspects of capitalist chaos - not because they are too weak to do the job, but because they believe that these institutions are too strong and so impinge on the rights of nation-states and the free market. They are critical of the healthcare system, not because it's inadequate to meet the needs of the population but because it’s too powerful - and they don’t much like welfare or redistribution of any kind.

To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying that they are really classic fascists, and that all that’s needed is a Scooby-Doo type unmasking. 

The Light is part of a new kind of far right. It doesn’t look like old-style conservatives or fascists. It’s prepared for the internet age, but unlike recent conspiracism with rarely moved offline, has adherents prepared to spend several days a week handing out a paper in the cold, organising face to face meetings and rallies. Their ideas and rhetoric are much more like the US “libertarian” far right, opposed to state intervention and welfare, and in support of “freedom” for those with money and privileges. And although The Light and its supporters are not themselves fascists, the paper has a problematically cosy relationship with some actual fascists. 

It picks up supporters in strange places and funnels them towards far right politics. Many of them don’t realise that they are being funnelled, and don’t have the political background to see what is happening. It builds on seemingly innocuous campaigns such as ‘keep cash’, which offer gateways to conspiracy theories which only become evident when one looks further into the promoters, such as the campaign run by Debbbie Hicks in the Hayes and Harlington local elections. 

It’s possible that some of the most committed supporters don’t even realise this - hence the protestations that they are not far right, the Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts, the claims to be a left splinter group, and so on. It doesn’t matter what they think about this, what matters is what they do - and from that it’s clear that The Light is a phenomenon and a project of the far right. Its positions on LGBTQ people, refugees and migrants, and feminism (all attacked as ‘woke’ at best and part of a conspiracy to divide at worst), free speech for racists and antisemites, and climate change denial, should be enough to demonstrate this. 

It’s important not to be taken in by rhetoric that says we are “all on the same side”. However nice the people handing out the paper are, whatever they used to be, they are, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a project that’s aimed at building a far right movement.

The purpose of classic fascism was to defend capitalism against the labour and socialist movements - to smash workers’ organisations. It’s not entirely clear yet, but it looks to me like the primary purpose of this new far right is to defeat environmentalist organisations and protect a system based on the production and consumption of fossil fuels. 

Though Hope Not Hate have published a piece (written by our Stroud-based campaigning group) and referred to The Light and some other aspects of this phenomenon, and the 12 Rules for What podcast has also explored this issues in audio form and in their book, it’s disappointing that the main anti-fascist organisations don’t seem to be taking much notice. 

It’s easy to dismiss this new movement as just a bunch of cranks who will turn out to be mostly harmless. I think that’s wrong. Sure, they don’t look like the Nazis in 1933 - but they do look a lot like the way the Nazis looked in 1923, a mostly fringe group in funny outfits who believed in all sorts of occultist nonsense and were only picking up limited numbers of recruits and votes. We should be taking notice, and preparing to confront their ideas and their presence.

This article appeared in Jewish Socialist (Issue 79, Spring 2024)

Review of "Israelism"

A very good film about how American Jews are socialised into support for Israel and Zionism, and how some young Jews are increasingly taking a stand against the occupation and Israeli racism. 

The politics and personal relations of Jewish critics and opponents of Israel are always very fraught. There's not much trust between tendencies that ought to be allies. Most of us have been called a "self-hating Jew" by someone, and some of us have also been called a "Zionist lackey" by someone else.

Some Jewish critics of Israel think that everything was fine until the Netanyahu government, or the occupation, or...something...and all that is needed is to get back to the good old days of good old Israel, before it unaccountably turned a bit nasty. Others are convinced that Zionism was always not only bad but evil, and that colonialism and racism were baked in from the beginning.

This film somehow manages to avoid all of this, not least by the technique of not having a narrator voice. Its perspective on Jewish angst, on those who support Israel whatever, and those who have shifted from supporters to critics, is to let them speak for themselves, and it works really well.

The film was made before the events of October 2023 and the long Israeli retaliation that followed, and that somehow makes it all the more powerful. I was really taken with the way some of the American Jews talked about their journeys, and the not unsympathetic depiction of just how central identification with Israel is in Jewish communities.

I was particularly pleased (if that's the right word) that the film didn't soft-pedal the existence of real, fascist-inspired Jew-hatred in America. For many Jewish and other antagonists of Israel, the question of antisemitism begins and ends with the false accusations aimed at themselves, so there is little recognition that conspiracy theories about Jews are still very very important to the far right. That's definitely not the case here, though there is some consideration to the way in focusing on criticism of Israel has led American Jewish organisations to take their eye off the real threat from real antisemites.

I was also very moved by Sami Awad's spot in the film, where he talked about his visit to Auschwitz and his understanding that Jewish trauma and fear underlies support for Israel's racism. I've rarely heard Palestinians talk about the Holocaust, except in terms of "why should we have to pay for it?". 

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via informal distribution.

Shlomo Epstein

My mum's grandfather, who I knew when I was a little child (until I was about eight, when he died) was usually called Solomon Epstein, though he seems to have sometimes been called Itzko. He was a tailor in the East End, and worked for other master tailors. He was never a master himself, and seems to have been unemployed outside the season. Family tradition says he had attended a yeshiva but became a Bundist, back in the town of Pruzhana (now in Belarus but then Eastern Poland). Later he was very pro-Communist, if not a party member, and thought very highly of Stalin.

He hadn’t meant to emigrate to England. He’d taken a boat to America but was refused entry, perhaps at Ellis Island, because he was suffering from the eye disease trachoma. As a result he ended up in London. 

He must have already been married to Sarah Trappski, who was the mother of his three daughters and a son; I know this because Sylvia’s father, Louis Epstein, was born in Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). I have a picture of him with his wife and four children, in which Sarah looks quite plump. A later picture of her, when she was probably already ill (I think with TB but it might have been cancer), shows a very emaciated woman.

He was married two more times after Sarah Trappski died (she’s buried in Frankfurt, where I think she went for treatment which was unsuccessful). The first time he married the widowed mother of Louis’s wife (Sylvia’s mother, known variously as Fay, Fayge, and Ruchel), the second time another widow called Lena, who had a daughter in Israel - I remember a picture of her in her army uniform. Lena kept chickens in the backyard, and fermented and pickled, and my mum remembers her infusing cherries in alcohol. 

When conscription was introduced in WW1 he wasn’t liable to be conscripted, because he wasn’t naturalised British. The British government went to some effort to sign military conventions with the governments of allied nations, allowing it to either conscript non-naturalised immigrants or deport them to serve in their ‘home’ armies, but it didn’t do this with Russians because there was some recognition that they were refugees from Czarist oppression. This changed in March 1917 when the first revolution overthrew the Czar, and the Kerensky government continued to fight alongside the allies. In August 1917 the Anglo Russian military convention was signed, making Russian subjects liable to conscription or deportation. 

One of the documents in my possession is of some sort of certificate, issued in 1918, by the Russian Embassy in London, then based in Gordon Square. It shows that the embassy staff have manually corrected the headed notepaper to remove the word ‘Imperial’. On the back, in pencil, is some text in the first person about Shlomo/Itzko - I don’t think he wrote it himself. It describes how he came to England and concludes with words that emphasise his claim to be a Russian.

As described in Harold Shukman’s book ‘War Or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917’, the mainly anti-war immigrants were advised by their socialist leaders to opt for deportation - it was assumed that the government was too busy to organise deportation and transport to Russia. This turned out to be wrong (though perhaps not bad advice, given the level of slaughter on the western front by then) and the immigrants - Jews, but also Lithuanian miners in Scotland - were rounded up and put on a ship for Archangel. 

Shukman describes what happened to them thereafter. By the time they arrived there was no Russian army left for them to serve in, and they wandered around Russia during the early stages of the civil war. At some point in 1918 they reached Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro in Ukraine. I have a composite picture, with lots of insets, showing portraits of what was probably the deportees; some text on one of the insets says ‘Members of the Convention, taken in Ekaterinoslav XI 1918.’ There is also a picture of a ship and some railway lines. 

Shlomo spent several years in Russia, during what must have been the civil war. At some point he is said to have found his way to family members who stayed behind in Russia, and there recovered from typhus. Eventually he found his way back to London (some time in the early 1920s), though family tradition says that when the ship docked he wasn’t allowed to disembark, and had to return the following day on another ferry. 

Kasatchok!

For years the Red Band in London, and then the Stroud Red Band, played a tune called Kasatchok. It's a Russian traditional dance tune, or so I thought. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine we stopped playing it, not because we're boycotting everything that ever was Russian, but it didn't feel too good. Someone pointed out that a kasatchok was also a Ukrainian dance; did that make it better? Did the fact that it was a Ukrainian cossack dance make it worse again? After all fear and hatred of cossacks in part of Jewish folk-memory; my dad told me that in the 43 Group they used to call the mounted police in London "cossacks".

Then a friend reminded me that there are Italian words to the tune, which became a song of the Italian partisan resistance to the Nazis - Fischia il Vento. With that name it was programmed into a little electric keyboard that his child has. Here is a nice version by the Modena City Ramblers, an Italian lefty band...for some reason they are wearing kilts to perform this, perhaps because they think of themselves as playing Irish traditional music.

And then I remembered that the song used to be played a lot at Jewish weddings and barmitzvahs, at which the young men would try to dance a pseudo-Russian squatting dance that they would call the "kazotzkas", which would result in everyone getting very sore thighs. In fact I had once thought of it as a Jewish tune, and I recalled that there was a Hebrew version. I'm pretty sure we sang it once or twice in my Zionist youth movement, and it turns out that it was translated into Hebrew as early as 1945, probably as part of the Socialist-Zionist love affair with all things Soviet.

And finding the Hebrew version on YouTube, I also came across this, which has to be a strong contender for the weirdest thing on the internet - a Yiddish version, syncopated, performed by some sort of folk choir from Birobidzhan, in a made-up Jewish folk costume. Are these people actually even Jews? What tradition does this costume, and this song and dance, form part of?

Of course it turns out that the tune is not a traditional one but was written by Matvey Isaakovich Blanter,  a Soviet (Jewish) composer in 1938. 

Review of "Jews don't count" by David Baddiel

I appreciated (I can't say enjoyed) this much more than I expected to ("Sunday Times Bestseller" on the cover didn't help, because I don't expect the Murdoch press to be a reliable ally against racism, and it rather reinforces the idea that being against antisemitism is the establishment's favourite kind of antiracism).

I've never been a fan of Baddiel's comedy, and I had ingested the criticism of him as having done "blackface" in his comedy act, so how can he possibly have an opinion about racism? But actually he deals with that quite well in the book - he admits that the act was racist, and he apologizes, and asks why that disqualifies him from ever commenting about any other kind of racism. 

And yeah, the book is mainly about antisemitism among progressives - or more accurately, about the failure of progressives to respond to antisemitism, however blatant. And actually having read it has changed my perceptions of stuff that I wouldn't have made a fuss about a few weeks ago - a "Roald Dahl" show at our local theatre venue, because he may have been a Jew-hater, but that doesn't stop him being a posthumous national treasure. A friend who thinks of herself as an anti-racist springing to the defence of Kayne West on social media, because she thinks it's terrible the way the media persecutes Black men. Friends who say Jeremy Corbyn is a nice and sincere man (I'm sure he is, and there is so much about him to admire) so he can't possibly be antisemitic. 

For me there's still too much about Twitter in the book - I just don't engage with it that much, and I will engage lef

Review of “Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn From It” by David Renton

The last few years have not been fun for a lot of Jewish socialists. No sooner had the Labour Party - which some of us had written off as a vehicle for political change - unexpectedly elected an actual socialist as its leader, than we were deluged with a flood of accusations that the man, who had a long history of involvement in anti-racist struggles, was actually racist towards Jews. 

A series of unfortunate events followed, and the responses to them became factionalised and also poisonous. It seemed almost impossible to assert that there was some truth on both sides of the many arguments - that the left generally, the left in the Labour Party, and the party itself really did have a problem with antisemitism and that at the same time there were unscrupulous people within and outside Labour who were “weaponising” this problem to attack the left in the party and Labour itself. And others who used the opportunity to attack anyone who’d ever tried to criticise Israel or Zionism.

David Renton gives a detailed account of many of the incidents and episodes...the Mear One mural, Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone’s Hitler outburst, Jackie Walker and the slave trade, IHRA definition, the Chakrabarti report, the EHRC investigation and its report...He’s a lawyer by profession, and this is reflected in the detail and also in the sometimes legalistic discussion; he refers to specific elements of anti-discrimination legislation and applies them to what actually occurred.. But despite this he remains resolute that no set of rules and procedures could have saved the day - what was needed, and still is, is a proper political understanding of antisemitism and its place in political culture.

The author is at great pains to be fair to the people he is writing about, and gives them the most sympathetic interpretation possible of what they said or meant to say. He does this with Jackie Walker, with Ken Livingstone, with Chris Williamson...and sometimes it feels like he’s just trying too hard, and that what he ought to be doing is blasting these people for wallowing in the fetid pools on the outskirts of political culture. He does the same with Luciana Berger, the JLM-supporting MP who I never had much time for, and who became a bitter enemy of the left.

He’s mainly kind to Jon Lansman, who emerges as something of a hero from the narrative, and he’s nicer to the JLM than I would have been, even though I know some people who are members and are actually quite decent. He’s even kind to the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, treating his thoughts on Corbyn as if they were part of a considered and intellectually coherent commentary.

And he has a sensible, balanced approach to what Zionism means to Palestinians, and what it means to middle-of-the-road British Jews, which is not the same thing at all.

There are some things - inevitably - that don’t make it into the book. The various episodes involving Ken Loach, stretching all the way back to the ‘Perdition’ affair. The way that Corbyn himself, and his supporters, seemed unable to issue any condemnation of antisemitism without immediately adding “and all forms of racism”...a verbal tick which some have compared to the “All Lives Matter” racist response to Black Lives Matter. The often-repeated assertion that “our movement has a proud history” of antiracism, which is both untrue and irrelevant. 

But there is lots more about the present conjuncture...the failures of the Jewish Communal leader in the UK - unlike their American counterparts - to address the antisemitism of the right. The characteristics of the Corbyn moment, including the influx of people who’d never been involved in politics before and the left’s inability to absorb them. The political culture of the left, and the nastiness of online communication and social media in general. And the strangeness of the political culture of the broader ‘movement’, which includes a huge swathe of people who identify with some sort of anti-establishment feeling, manifest this by a willingness to believe in multiple and sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories about ‘the elite’, and are ripe for harvesting by the far right even if they don’t think of themselves as any kind of facist. Anyone who has found themselves in a conversation with an anti-vaxxer, or a believer in 5G conspiracies, will recognise this and welcome Renton’s sensible discussions about what this means for us.

I’ve never met David Renton, though I’ve enjoyed reading his blog posts. We’ve exchanged a few messages via Facebook, mainly me telling him that I’ve appreciated something he’s written. But I wish I’d known him during the period that his book covers; it might have made it easier to live through the misery.

The contradictions of Zionism

This post is (yet another one) about Zionism...

...and therefore inevitably fraught.

Some of that comes from the fact that supporters of the Israeli government try to deflect all criticism of Israel and solidarity with the Palestinians by saying that it’s motivated - consciously or otherwise - by hatred of Jews. Some of them actually believe this, and sometimes they say it in bad faith because it’s effective.

And there are people who really are Jew-haters, who don’t care much about Palestinians or what Israel does to them, but use “Zionist” as a code-word for Jew. There’s more of this about than there used to be...you don’t have to go far in to many conspiracy theory websites before you find it...David Icke goes on about “Rothschild-Zionists”, Sandi Adams who spoke at the anti-lockdown rally in Stratford Park hosted material like this on her website.

And some people conclude from this that “it’s better not to talk about Zionism at all, because everyone means different things by it”. But we need to, because understanding the different meanings that are attached to it, and where these have come from, is a first step towards developing a decent politics that can address both Palestine and anti-semitism.

The central contradiction of Zionism

There is a distinction that is often made between the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ and the ‘nationalism of the oppressor’. Zionism is both, and that makes talking about it more difficult. 

In Israel now Zionism underlies and provides the justification for the oppression of Palestinians, inside Israel ‘proper’ - the internationally recognised borders of Israel from 1967 - and in the territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. (For an in-depth illustration see the  website of B’tselem - an Israeli organisation that describes the situation as ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea').

It’s considered an extreme left-wing view in Israel to say that Israel should be “a state for all its citizens”. Two years ago the Israeli parliament narrowly passed a law saying that Israel is ‘the nation-state of the Jewish people’...that is, it belongs to all the Jews of the world, whatever their citizenship status. And not to all of its citizens.

Now to most people around the world who believe in democracy this seems weird, but the debate in Israel is about whether it should be a law or not, not whether it’s right. Stuff like this is part of the intellectual and ideological and legal apparatus that enables oppression.

Nationalism of the oppressed: a response to antisemitism

To have productive conversations about Zionism, we need to go back further - and understand the ideology and movement as something that started out as a response to the predicament of the millions of East European Jews, particularly those in the Russian Empire. 

Antisemitism has a very long history in European civilisation - the blood libels (the often-repeated fiction that Jews murder Christian children for their blood), the massacres during the crusades, sinister Jews in art and literature. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 (and other countries in Western Europe at other times). The first immigration act in Britain, the 1905 Aliens Act, was introduced to keep out Jewish refugees from Russia.

The modern version of antisemitism was a mass political movement with its own parties and newspapers, and an explicit ideology that explained what was wrong with the world in terms of the involvement of evil Jews. 

Jewish life in Russia (Russian-governed Poland was the largest population of Jews in the world) was characterized by legal restrictions, state persecution, and organised street violence - the Black Hundreds was a popular Russian antisemitic organisation involved in organising pogroms (state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots that turned into massacres). 

In 1902-3 the Russian secret service forged a document, ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’, which claimed to be a secret plan for Jews to take over the world and it’s still in circulation today… this is the sort of stuff that Icke and Sandi Adams promote, and is promoted, via Qanon, in the US Republican Party..  

The catalyst for the founding of the political Zionist movement was the 1894 Dreyfus trial in France, which demonstrated to some that Jews would never be accepted as equal citizens by their non-Jewish counterparts.

From the foundation of the Zionist movement in 1897 the mainstream ‘Political Zionism’ sought to get backing from one or more major European powers to help them get a state. Political Zionism argued that the ‘Jewish Problem’ could be resolved by creating a state for the Jewish people and organising the mass migration of Jews to that state. This was referred to as the ‘Normalization of the Jewish People’. From early on the place chosen for that state was to be Palestine, seen as the site of the last time there had been an independent Jewish state. A key slogan was “A land without a people for a people without a land”, which ignored the fact that Palestine was inhabited.

Zionism wasn’t the only kind of Jewish nationalism- there were others like the Sejmists and Jewish Autonomists, and Territorialists; there was the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement that was big in Russia and Poland. In some ways Zionism was similar to the other movements of oppressed nationalities in Europe - the Polish, Czech, Finnish, etc. If history had unfolded differently Zionism might have turned into an interesting footnote in history, like some of the other European settlements in Palestine, or like Marcus Garvey’s  ‘Back to Africa’ movement in the US. And there were other responses to the oppression of Jews - the individual response of migrating to America or somewhere else, for example. Others placed their hopes in the international Communist movement, hoping that the overthrow of capitalism would also put an end to antisemitism.

Nationalism of the oppressor: a colonial movement in Palestine

“Practical Zionism” sought to encourage Jews to migrate to Palestine without waiting for a state, and to establish the nucleus of a new society there. 

This included the creation of communities - sometimes utopian communes with socialist or anarchist characteristics, as well as more conventional businesses, farms and towns. It wasn’t a big success - many more Jews migrated to America than to Palestine; between 1907 and 1914 the comparable figures were 20,000 vs. 1.5 million. 

But Practical Zionism had one important consequence; the Zionists discovered that Palestine was after all inhabited. There were a variety of responses. In general it wasn’t seen as a big problem, partly because they thought there were only a few hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs at most, and millions of Jews would be migrating to Palestine. Some Zionists convinced themselves that the Palestinian Arabs would be pleased once they understood how the creation of a Jewish state would benefit them. 

“Labour Zionists'' thought that it was necessary to create a segregated labour market, with protection for Jewish workers who would otherwise be undercut by low-waged Arab workers - otherwise they wouldn’t be able to persuade Jewish workers to immigrate. They organised unions that called for Jewish-owned businesses to boycott Arab workers, at the same as they tried to persuade those Arab workers to join special Arab-only unions to fight for higher wages. There was a wide spread of opinion, and some socialist-Zionists like the ‘Left Poale Tzion’ and Hashomer Hatzair took the socialism part seriously and tried to make common cause with the Arab workers in Palestine, with very limited success.

After WW1 the British Empire took Palestine away from the Turkish Empire, and the British began to sometimes tolerate and sometimes encourage Jewish immigration into Palestine. 

With the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, and other countries closing their doors to Jewish refugees, the pressure to allow Jews into Palestine increased, and the Palestinian Arabs  - who knew that the Zionists were intending to turn their country into a Jewish state - became ever more hostile.
So from early on Zionism had two different aspects, and this is still important now. 

In Europe it was a movement of an oppressed minority, offering national pride and cultural identity. 
In Palestine it acted as a movement and an ideology of colonists, seeking to take over a territory and dominate the local inhabitants. It wasn’t interested in immediate self-government or independence for Palestine because it needed the British Empire to enforce the right of Jews to immigrate - an independent Arab-controlled Palestine would have stopped that. 

The impact of the Holocaust

The Holocaust changed the way that Jewish communities around the world responded to Zionism.

A majority of Europe’s Jews died in the Nazi genocide - two out of three, and many of those who survived were dispossessed, displaced and devastated by the loss of everything and everyone they had known. Before the Holocaust lots of Jews were anti-Zionist or at least not Zionist. Orthodoxy was opposed on the grounds that returning to Erez Yisrael before the coming of the Messiah was sacrilegious. Reform Jews, who were keen to present Jews as a denomination rather than a nationality, were also opposed - as were some successfully assimilated and prosperous Jews, the other kinds of Jewish nationalist, and most Jewish socialists. 

After the Holocaust, the Zionist view that the Jews would never be accepted in the countries in which they lived seemed to have been vindicated. Jews who had never been Zionists, and never became ideological Zionists, nevertheless found themselves supporting the nascent Israeli state in its ‘War of Independence’.  The creation of a state that - unlike the British administration in Palestine - would permit the mass immigration of the displaced Holocaust survivors seemed to have become a matter of urgency.

The brief honeymoon between Zionism one the one hand and the USSR and the international Communist movement on the other made this much easier. The state of Israel was fought for with Soviet and Czechoslovak weapons, Communists across Europe helped Jews breach the British blockade against emigration to Palestine, and Communist-sympathising young Jews volunteered to fight for the newly established state. Isaac Deutscher, the anti-Zionist biographer of Trotsky, regretted that he had opposed Zionism and not tried to persuade more European Jews to migrate to Palestine.

That was then, and Deutscher and his heirs avoided becoming belated converts to Zionism. Every so often the remnants of left Zionism appear to be making a last-ditch stand against what they would like to think of as the ‘betrayal’ of their ideals, but these become progressively intellectually less convincing, and less politically significant and the organisations loyal to these ideas diminish numerically. Some of the opposition to the occupation comes from people who characterise themselves as left or liberal Zionists, but this opposition seems to be forever compromised by ideological acrobatics to distinguish between the nasty things that go on in the Occupied Territories and the ‘democratic’ character of Israel proper.

For most Jews outside Israel, even those who aren’t ideologically or organisationally involved with Zionism, identification with Israel and with the word ‘Zionism’ is part of their personal identity. 
Most Jews in Britain identify as Zionists, even those who don’t like the Israeli government, oppose settlements and the occupation. People like me, who don’t consider themselves Zionists, are comparatively rare. We don’t know how rare, but we aren’t represented in the Jewish community, and when you start to get embroiled in the arguments between Jews about who represents what, and say things like “not all Jews are Zionists” you are opening up some complex stuff with a long history.

This identification is bound up with a memory of fear and precariousness. The extermination of most of Europe’s Jews happened in my parents’ lifetime, to their cousins. It might seem odd to POC that British Jews, who are mostly white and seem to be safe and privileged, don’t feel themselves to be so...but when I look at the people in rubber boats trying to make it across the Meditterranean or the English Channel, or the columns of refugees trying to cross borders in Southern and Central Europe, I think about my parents’ generation and those who tried and failed to cross borders or seas to escape to safety. 

I grew up Zionist. I went to a state-funded Jewish primary school that was run by a Zionist organisation. The Hebrew that I learned there was the Israeli kind - I didn’t even understand why older people pronounced Hebrew in a completely different way. The songs we sang were Israeli songs, in Hebrew. We celebrated Jewish holidays the way they did in Israel. There were maps of Israel and Israeli flags all over the school...I don’t think there was one British flag or map of Britain. Later on as a teenager I joined a Zionist youth movement, where we went camping, and got off with each other, and sung more Israeli songs and practiced living like a utopian community.

I don’t consider myself a Zionist now… I know too much about the role that Zionism plays in Israel and Palestine, and I don’t think it makes sense for Jews in this country to consider themselves as members of a “Jewish Nation”, even though I can’t think of myself as English either. But I don’t call myself an anti-Zionist either, because of all the stuff that I’ve just been talking about, and because I want to be able to have a conversation with other Jews who have an attachment to the word, and even to Israel, without falling at the first fence.