Labour
held three separate inquiries into antisemitism within its ranks during the
first part of 2016. A new book by Dave Rich investigates how we got to this
point.
By
David Patrikarakos
The
relationship between the left and the Jews has always been a complex one –
ostensibly harmonious but with an underlying unease. For decades, the left’s
ideological stance against racism and intolerance made it – in Britain, at
least – a natural home for Jews. Its largest party, Labour, could rely on a
majority share of Britain’s Jewish vote. Yet the 19th-century German socialist
August Bebel, who described antisemitism as “the socialism of fools”,
understood that, like a tumour, it has always existed in the left-wing body
politic.
It
is this duality that Dave Rich seeks to explore in his impressive and important
book. How, he asks, did we get to the situation in which Labour, the party
whose founding principles include opposing bigotry, felt the need to hold three
separate inquiries into antisemitism within its ranks during the first part of
2016?
For
so long, the dichotomy was simple, consisting of a clash of two notions of the
Jew: an oppressed figure deserving of the left’s solidarity and the perennial
embodiment of socialism’s great enemy, capitalism. In the words of (the Jewish)
Karl Marx:
What
is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money
. . . Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may
exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities . .
. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.
Whether
or not Marx meant the words ironically (as many academics contend), he
articulated the most prominent leftist critique of Jews of his time. However,
as Britain’s former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks has argued, antisemitism, like
any virus, must mutate to survive. Now the most significant word in the
quotation above – which Marx uses figuratively – is not “money”, as he would
have seen it, but “Israel”.
As
Rich notes, the link between British Jews and Israel is almost inviolable.
While support for Israeli policies is mixed (there is much opposition to the
settlements), he records that 82 per cent of British Jews say that the country
plays a central role in their identity, while 90 per cent see it as the
ancestral home of the Jewish people. Set against this is his (correct)
observation that: “Sympathy for the Palestinian cause and opposition to Israel
have become the default position for many on the left – a defining marker of
what it means to be progressive.” He argues that once you discover what someone
on the left thinks about Israel and Zionism, you can usually guess his or her
views on terrorism, Islamist extremism, military intervention and British-American
relations.
When
Stalin’s show trials and bloodlust finally discredited communism, many on the
left, bereft of an ideology, fell into a dull, almost perfunctory
anti-Americanism, dressed up as “anti-imperialism”. Intellectually flaccid but
emotionally charged, this strand of thought became – to those on the hard left
who had for so long been confined to the margins – all-encompassing. The dictum
“My enemy’s enemy is my friend”, in effect, was adopted as its slogan. Any
Middle Eastern or South American dictatorship that “stands up” to the US ipso
facto is an ally, as is any Islamist hate preacher who does so. Israel, viewed
as a US-backed colonial outpost, became the physical manifestation of all that
was wrong with the world.
With
Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader last year, this particular leftist
world-view entered the heart of the party. In 2008, Corbyn wrote of the Balfour
Declaration – the UK government’s promise to British Jews of a homeland in
Palestine – that it had “led to the establishment of the state of Israel in
1948 and the expulsion of Palestinians . . . Britain’s history of colonial
interference . . . leaves it with much to answer for.” The description of
Israel as a colonialist enterprise, rather than a movement for sovereignty
through national independence, and the culpability of an “imperial” Britain,
encapsulate the twin impulses that drive Corbyn’s beliefs about foreign
affairs.
The
problem, Rich argues, is that it is just a short step from these beliefs to the
ideas that Israel should not exist and that its Western supporters, who include
most Jews, are racists. Combined with a resurgence of social media-charged
conspiracies about Zionist wealth and power, the left has formed an anti-racist
politics that is blind to antisemitism. Jews are privileged; they are wealthy;
they cannot be victims.
Thus,
“Zionist” has become not a term to describe a political position but an insult;
thus, Jews, unless they denounce Israel (their “original sin”), are excluded
from the left that now dominates the Labour Party. When such ideas become
normalised, anything is possible. Jackie Walker, the recently suspended
vice-chairwoman of the Corbyn-supporting group Momentum, can claim with
sincerity that “many Jews” were the “chief financiers” of the slave trade, a
modern myth and piece of bigotry popularised by the Nation of Islam’s Louis
Farrakhan – a notorious antisemite – in a 1991 book.
By
the middle of this year, as many as 20 Labour Party members had been suspended
or expelled for alleged antisemitism. At times, Rich appears bewildered. Though
he never articulates it, the question “What has happened to my party?” echoes
through these pages. Is it a case of just a few bad apples, or is the whole
barrelful rotten? The answer, Rich concludes convincingly, in this powerful
work that should be read by everyone on the left, is sadly the latter.
