Does ‘left anti-Semitism’ exist or is it a pretext for social imperialism?

Brighton 15th September 2016

The transcript of this debate can also be found here and the file can be download here

Chaired by Mark Sandell – Elected, Deposed & now Expelled Chair,
Brighton & Hove District Labour Party

This is a debate which was held in Brighton as to the
merits of AWL’s theory of ‘left anti-Semitism’. 
In essence this theory is just a regurgitation of the old Zionist refrain
that anti-Semitism equals anti-Zionism. 
Except it’s dressed up in pseudo-left rhetoric.

AWL have had considerable problems persuading anyone
of the merits of their arguments.  They
accept that the ‘anti-Semitism’ they are talking about is not a form of
racism.  This therefore presupposes that
there can be a non-racist form of anti-Semitism.  To my mind this is a crackpot theory which
comes apart at the seams almost as soon as it is road tested.

The debate was chaired by someone who is a supporter
of the AWL and although I didn’t want to make a principle out of it, it is the
normally accepted convention that the person who goes first in a debate also goes
last in the debate.  It is also normally
accepted that the Chair doesn’t intervene with a question in the middle of a
speaker’s summing up!

I therefore have a few things to add to what was a two
hour debate.

Firstly this debate doesn’t take place in a
vacuum.  It comes in the wake of a long
and vicious campaign by the Right in the Labour Party together with the
Zionists in the form of the so-called Jewish Labour Movement to weaponise
anti-Semitism.  ‘Anti-Semitism’ is
wielded against anyone who disagrees with the Zionist narrative.

It is of course understandable that the Zionists
attack their opponents as anti-Semitic. 
How else would you defend land confiscation, house demolition, crop
destruction, torture etc?  It is far
better to attack your opponents than try to defend the indefensible.

I myself have been a victim of this form of defamation
as has Jackie Walker, who was until recently the Vice Chair of Momentum’s
Steering Committee until she was removed at the behest of its Chair, Jon
Lansman.  Because of their social chauvinism
and imperialist politics, Lansman was aided in this task by Jill Mountford, the
AWL member of Momentum’s SC.

One major component of AWL’s argument in support of Zionism which is
almost identical to bourgeois commentators like Jonathan Freeland.   In Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem Jonathan Freedland
argued that ‘A
recent survey found that 93%
of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity.’ which was
exactly Daniel Randall’s argument.

In other words if you oppose an identity, then you are in the case
of the Jews anti-Semitic.  And if that
identity revolves around support for a reactionary apartheid state, you are still
anti-Semitic –albeit a non-racist form of anti-Semitism!  Logically if you oppose Ulster Loyalism,
which is to be found among sections of the Scottish working-class, a bigoted
sectarian allegiance, than you are anti-Protestant and also a non-racist
racist!

Opposing an identity is never
by itself racist.  Of course if you
attack a religion in order to attack a group of people, demonizing a particular
religion, as the far-Right does with Islam, then that is racist because what
they are doing is attacking the religion, not because they are atheists but as
a cover, a disguise for their racism.

Daniel made heavy weather of the accusation that the anti-Zionism of
the Left originates in the anti-Semitism of Stalinist Soviet Union.  This again is complete nonsense without an
iota of evidence, for example a comparison of written material.  The anti-Zionism of the Left originates from the
New Left of the post-1968 generation which owed nothing to Stalinism.  It was one of the hallmarks of the New Left
that they rejected both Stalinism and Washington.  This bankrupt theory is one borrowed lock,
stock and Zionist barrel from Zionist apologists.

Despite their pretensions, the AWL itself does not seriously care
about 2 states.  It knows it will never
happen.  What their concern with is
supporting the Israeli state.  That is
why the AWL have consistently opposed the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions against Israel.  It is a
thoroughly chauvinist campaign in support of Jewish settler colonialism.

When I spoke in 2007 and in 2008 at the UNISON national conference for
motions supporting BDS, who were amongst the speakers opposing the motion?  The AWL. 
The same happened in the University Colleges Union, the AWL has been
consistently hostile to BDS.  BDS has
been the one thing that has seriously rattled Netanyahu who has set up a Ministry
of Strategic Alliances under Gilad Erdan, the Public Security Minister,
with a $50 million budget to combat BDS. 

Indeed if the AWL seriously supported a 2 state position then they
would support BDS because without pressure there is no possibility that Israel will
make any concessions.  BDS is the one
weapon with which to pressurise Israel to do anything yet the AWL has fought it
consistently in the unions.  In opposing
the Palestine solidarity movement on this, despite the request of Palestinians
under occupation to support BDS, the AWL confirm that their real agenda is one
of support for Zionism using the incoherent ‘left anti-Semitism’ theory to
justify their lurch to supporting imperialism in the Middle East.

Finally I did object when Daniel tried to say that I was arguing
that the Zionists participated in the holocaust.  I said they collaborated on certain
occasions, as a petty bourgeois movement but that outside Palestine they
obstructed the rescue efforts of others because they saw everything from the
perspective of building their future ‘Jewish’ state.  Rescue was only acceptable if it was
channelled into Palestine.  Thus the
illegal immigration Aliya B saved about 6,000 people whereas the Soviet Union
is estimated to have saved up to 2 million Jews.  When it came to saving Jews, Palestine was
almost irrelevant, but in so far as Palestine and Zionism broke the Jewish
Boycott of Nazi Germany with the Ha’avara trading agreement with Nazi Germany,
the movement was rightly called a scab movement.  That is the movement that the AWL seek to
support.

I have added sources to the quotes I made during the course of the debate so that people can access them for themselves.  Any additions are in square brackets.

I also include links to two articles by Professor Moshe Machover, the veteran Israeli Jewish Marxist and anti-Zionist, covering AWL’s politics.

Tony Greenstein

Tony Greenstein

The debate tonight is
about what I consider a crackpot theory, ‘left anti-Semitism’.  I don’t accept that there is such a
thing.  There is certainly anti-Semitism,
but I don’t accept that there is a left variant of it.  Certainly not today.  It was developed some 30 years ago by the
guru of the AWL, the Alliance 4 Workers Liberty, Sean Matgamna, it was part of
an internal drift within the organisation on imperialism.  For example on Ireland the group accepted in
essence the Partition of Ireland or on the Falklands/Malvinas War where the AWL
took a position which in essence was a pro-British one and then latterly in
Iraq where the AWL, alone amongst socialist groups, refused to call for an end
to the Occupation and the withdrawal of British troops.   So Israel/Palestine is not an isolated
example.

The theory of left
anti-Semitism itself is useless because it has no explanatory power.  It doesn’t help people understand
anything.  It acts, in essence, as a barrier
mechanism within the AWL for its own membership.  It’s a way of isolating people within the
organisation against outside influences. 
It’s a brand mark that distinguishes the AWL from other organisations
but in terms of helping people to understand anything, ‘left anti-Semitism’ has
no value whatsoever.

In so far as I
understand it, the theory posits that the opposition of the anti-Zionist left
towards Israel is motivated not by what Israel does, what it is and what its
role has been historically, but because of some innate and latent anti-Semitism
towards a Jewish state. 

In reality that is a
variant of something called ‘new anti-Semitism’ which was developed, by Abba
Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, in 1973, who talked about the ‘new
anti-Semitism’ of the Left whereby Israel was opposed, not because of what it
did or the way it treated the Palestinians, but because of peoples’ hatred
towards the Jewish state.

That argument was
developed by Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian Minister of Justice in the
1980’s, who termed Israel the ‘new Jew’. 
In other words opposition to Israel was because it was Jewish.  It was the ‘Jew among the nations.’ That was
why people were hostile to it.

Of course I
fundamentally disagree with that.  People
are no more opposed to Israel because it is Jewish than they were opposed to
Apartheid in South Africa because they were White or opposed to French Algerian
colonisation because the colonisers were French.  It is a nonsense.  It’s because of what that state does, how it
is created, how it is structured and how it operates. 

I think, in a sense, we
have seen the chickens come home to roost in the way that ‘left-anti-Semitism’
has played out in the Labour Party during the last year.  The AWL to be fair, to be kind to them, have
problems with this!  Even before Jeremy
Corbyn was elected , when it became apparent that he might be elected, the
accusations of anti-Semitism came about. 

The first accusations
were that Jeremy Corbyn was an associate of holocaust deniers.   There was no truth in this.  He attended a fund raising concert by a group
which was called Deir Yassin Remembered. 
In fact it wasn’t even organised by them, but a similarly named group,
but he was accused of association with a character called Paul Eisen, who is a
follower of Gilad Atzmon and is an anti-Semite. 
Atzmon is not a supporter of the Palestinians.  He is an ex-Israeli who is deeply
anti-Semitic.  Eisen is a constituent of
Jeremy Corbyn.  From time to time they
have met in that capacity, nothing more. 

The idea that Jeremy
somehow subscribes to holocaust denial or anti-Semitic theories because of this
character is an absolute nonsense.  It is
a typical guilt-by-association technique which originated with McCarthyism in
America.  You judge someone not by who
they are but by their alleged associations. 

Although it died down
for a time we had this anti-Semitism hype resurface with Gerald Kaufmann,
ironically a Jewish MP who made an incautious reference to ‘Jewish money’ and
that was held to be another example of ‘left anti-Semitism’ in the Labour
Party.  In fact Gerald is on the Right of
the Labour Party, the last surviving Minister in Harold Wilson’s
government.  He is certainly no
left-winger.

Gerald has developed
politically and he has come to oppose many of the things that Israel does and
that is why the Zionists had it in for him. 
As for the term Jewish money I did an experiment.  I inserted the phrase into the Jewish Chronicle
archives and came up with 590 references to this ‘anti-Semitic’ term!  So it’s not so uncommon in the Jewish
community. 

When you listen to
Michael Foster or other Zionists about how Jews will no longer be funding the
Labour Party and how all Jewish donors will stop giving, what is that if not a
reference to Jewish money?  It is a fuss
about nothing whatsoever.  But then it
developed with the affair at Oxford University in January of this year.  The Labour Club there decided to support
Israel Apartheid Week.  Not unnaturally,
since Israel is an Apartheid society. 
Because of that the Chair, Alex Chalmers, resigned.  Chalmers later turned out to be someone who
had worked for BICOM – the British Israel Media Communications Centre, the main
Israeli propaganda organisation in Britain. 
He was clearly someone attuned to the Zionist consensus. 

[8.29]     It later turned out that Chalmers
campaigned for the disaffiliation of Oxford University from the National Union
of Students.  Something which was lost by
over a thousand votes.  He was a
right-wing rat in every sense of the term. 
But according to the narrative, this was evidence of
‘anti-Semitism’.  When the Labour Club
was investigated by someone who was and is a supporter of Labour Friends of
Israel, Baroness Janet Royall, she could not find any evidence of
anti-Semitism.

In fact in her blog article for the Jewish Labour Movement, she
started off by saying ‘I know you will be disappointed that I couldn’t find any
evidence of institutional anti-Semitism.’ 
[actual quote was ‘‘know that you will share my
disappointment and frustration that the main headline coming out of my inquiry
is that there is no institutional Antisemitism in Oxford University Labour
Club.’ 

What kind of person says that they
are disappointed by the fact that they couldn’t find any evidence of
anti-Semitism?  This is an
absurdity.  One would have thought she
would be over the moon at the fact that she couldn’t find it!  But that is the Zionist mentality.  They want to find ‘anti-Semitism’ where it doesn’t
exist and they ignore it where it does exist. 
And so the show has gone on.

I was suspended in March.  They wouldn’t give me the reasons until they
were leaked to the Daily Telegraph and The Times.  But yes, anti-Semitism was the main charge.  Amongst my many other sins I was on record as
saying that Israel’s marriage laws were similar to the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi
Germany.  That was held to be a heinous
example of anti-Semitism.  Because you must
never compare Israel to Nazi Germany unless the people doing it are
Zionists.  That then is permissible but
opponents of Israel, anti-Zionists, must never compare Israel to Nazi
Germany. 

So I just pointed out in my
investigation interview that my quote, my comparison, didn’t originate in my
own head it came from the most distinguished political philosopher of the 20th
Century, Hannah Arendt, who herself was a refugee from Nazi Germany.  Famous for her book, the Origins of
Totalitarianism.  In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of
Evil, p.7., she said of the Eichmann trial that it was ironic that they
were denouncing the Nuremberg Laws and the forbidding of sexual and marriage
relations between Jews and non-Jews,
since in Israel the legal situation is the same.  Someone who is Jewish cannot marry someone
who is non-Jewish.  But if you tell the
truth these days you are going to be accused of anti-Semitism!

[The actual quote from Arendt is as follows:   ‘Israeli citizens, religious and
nonreligious, seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits
intermarriage, and it is chiefly for this reason – as Israeli officials outside
the courtroom were willing to admit – that they are also agreed upon the
undesirability of a written constitution in which such a law would embarrassingly
have to be spelled out… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté
with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which
had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and
Germans.  The better informed among the
correspondents were well aware of the irony but they did not mention it in
their reports.’]

Probably the biggest irony, and I
have to confess that I couldn’t stop laughing, was last week.  If anyone saw Question Time, the debate between
Owen Smith, a despicable character if ever there was one, if he had a
personality he would be dangerous, and 
Jeremy Corbyn.  When Smith gave us
an example of the anti-Semitic infiltrators into the Labour Party he mentioned
the Alliance for Workers Liberty.  I
thought that this is rich justice.  God
has a sense of humour.  It is well
deserved.  They have been bitten by the
very monster that they helped create!  So
I didn’t have a terrible sympathy for them! 
Although of course I oppose the expulsion of Pete Radcliffe from
Nottingham AWL as a consequence of those remarks.  That is an example of how the Right will
define anything on the Left as ‘anti-Semitic’.  
If you are a leftist you must be anti-Semitic.

[12.25]   It’s not original either. 
In America in the 1980’ when there were big conflicts in the Black
ghettos between teachers and Black parents. 
Being Black or on the Left was considered a form of anti-Semitism
because many of the teachers were Jewish.

In
Israel today the term ‘leftist’ is a form of abuse.  Approximately 8% of Israelis according to the
Pew Opinion Survey earlier this year identify as being on the Left.  [Israel’s Religiously
Divided Society,
March 8 2016]

[13:15]   If we look at Zionism as
an ideology, then Zionism itself was always seen as a form of Jewish
anti-Semitism by Jews.  Zionism was
formed as a political movement in 1897 when it held its first World Congress in
Basel in Switzerland.  Most people won’t
know this but it was originally intended to be held in Munich in Germany.  The Jewish community in Munich rose up as one
and said that they didn’t want this Congress to be held there because it was a
form of anti-Semitism.  They saw it as
jeopardising their position.  This was
because historically, the attitude of Zionism was that Jews do not belong in
the Diaspora, the countries they live and were born in, outside Palestine.   They held it was an unnatural situation
Zionism came to terms with anti-Semitism. 
They saw it as the rightful reaction of non-Jews to the alien Jewish
presence in their midst. 

Daniel
Randall – Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

Jeremy Corbyn today put
out a restatement of his policy position on Israel/Palestine and the Middle
East in which he reaffirmed his commitment to a 2 State settlement based on the
1967 borders.  That’s the position
Workers Liberty shares and I look forward to Tony’s denuncation of Jeremy
Corbyn as a Zionist because of that position. 
People should read Corbyn on that. 
It’s pretty solid.

What I’m going to
try to do in my time is set out in positive terms Workers’ Liberty’s position
on the issues under discussion.  I think
the differences between ourselves and Tony approach are almost innumerable and
extend well beyond matters of policy. 
Given that it is probably easiest to shine a light on them by just setting
out our positive case and hopefully our differences will become clear in the
course of that.

[24:09]   I do want to say from the outset that it is
undeniably the case that the issue of anti-Semitism has been instrumentalised and
manipulated by some on the Labour Right and their supporters in the press in
order to undermine Corbyn and the Left. 
As Tony mentioned, last week Owen Smith accused us of anti-Semitism on
national television, so it is very clear that there is a certain process going
on there, a certain instrumentalisation and manipulation of an issue for
cynical factional ends.  It has to be
understood and opposed on its own terms.

However the cynical instrumentalisation
of an issue doesn’t mean that that issue isn’t real and contrary to what Tony
said it is not our view that anyone who opposes Israeli policy or who opposes
Israel’s bombing of Gaza is anti-Semitic. 
That’s a nonsense which you can clearly see from any number of thousands
of words we have written on the topic.

[25:06}   It is however our view that sections of the
far left, inside and outside the Labour Party, maintain what you might call a
political common sense on certain questions, not just Israel and Palestine but
aspects of Jewish history and Jewish identity more widely, which we believe has
a logic which leads almost inevitably to political hostility to Jews. 

Now we can have a
semantic argument about whether it is reasonable to call that anti-Semitism and
later I am going to talk about the distinction between that and direct racist
antipathy to Jews, there is absolutely a distinction.  When we talk about a left anti-Semitism, it’s
a shorthand for that.  For that implied
political logic of the common sense which prevails in certain sections of the
far-left on some of those questions, which is distinct from racist hostility or
fascist or Hitlerite anti-Semitism to Jews and regardless of the machinations
of the Right in the Labour Party and elsewhere, the Left has a responsibility
to get its own house in order on these questions. 

[26:13]   I think Tony probably represents an amplified
form of some of that common sense which is why we want to have that debate
tonight.  Tony himself must recognise
that anti-Semitism or accommodation to it exists on the left, or within broadly
left-wing spaces because he was a strident critic of the SWP’s association with
the jazz musician and rabid anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon and brought no small
amount of opprobium upon himself through that criticism. 

[26:41]   But I would imagine, I don’t want to put
words in his mouth, I would imagine that Tony like many others would reduce
that sort to a question of averages.  Which
is to say anti-Semitism and other bigotries exist in society, the left is not
hermetically sealed off from society so it is inevitable that those bigotries
will manifest in some form on the left, it has nothing to do with any kind of
particular logic or prevalent political hegemony that exists on the Left. 

We disagree.  In our view, as I’ve said, it is possible to
identify what we call, as a shorthand, a left anti-Semitism by which we don’t
mean a variant of anti-Semitism which is left-wing but rather a political hostility
to Jews that exists as a logic, often only implied, of far left common sense that
exists on various issues.  As I’ve said
and I do want to reiterate this, so it is understood, we draw a distinction, a
very crucial distinction, between that implied political hostility to Jews and
straightforward anti-Jewish racism.

[27:42]   Now sometimes they do overlap, but they are
distinct phenomenon.  That is
important.  I think this left
anti-Semitism manifests itself most clearly in the perspectives of some
far-left groups and currents towards Israel-Palestine in particular and that it
has identifiable historical roots, which I’ll try and given an explanation of
today.  I’ll be arguing that the form of
anti-Zionism that prevails on much of the far-left today, a form of
anti-Zionism which exceptionalises and essentialises Jewish nationalism and
which was inherited almost wholesale from Stalinism should be replaced with
something closer to the more rational anti-Zionism of the pre-Stalinists and
pre-1967 Trotskyist revolutionary left and I’ll go into a bit more of that
historical background later.

[28:30]   The situation in the Labour Party, which Tony
talked about in some detail, is the backdrop to this debate but I don’t intend
to dwell in too much detail on that but rather use it as a point of
departure.  I will however say that the
recommendations of the Chakrabarti Inquiry into this issue, which make
recommendations for improving due process and procedure around complaints
against Labour Party members, as well as some recommendations about language
and discourse on some of the questions we are talking about tonight, are very
good basically and I hope those recommendations are implemented.  I encourage everyone here to read that Report
if you haven’t already.  However that is
only the jumping off point and I want to take a slightly wider historical
approach to the issues we are talking about. 

[29:09]   Anti-Semitism is a historically peculiar form
of chauvinism in at least two ways. 
Firstly, unlike most bigotries, it contends that the target group, Jews,
are powerful, cunning and all controlling rather than stupid or lazy.  So anti-Black racism for example is almost
always based on the idea that Black people are stupid and fit only to perform
menial tasks in the service of White people. 

Anti-Semitism isn’t
like that.  On the contrary it contends
that the target group are clever, powerful and all controlling.  The second way in which anti-Semitism is a
historically peculiar form of chauvinism is that it is a prejudice you can
escape from by converting.  Karl Marx’s
father did just that.  There is a
substantial historical set of examples of that taking place. 

[30:07}   Anti-Semitism on the left is not new.  It’s an interesting historical curio that the
term anti-Semitism was first popularised not by a right-winger but by Wilhelm
Marr, an 1848 revolutionary and a proto-anarchist of sorts and there is an
anti-Semitic element to the writing of mid-19th century leftists
like Duhring, Sterner, Bower and others. 

Now all of those
people thought of themselves as and in a lot of ways were radicals and
progressives, but they saw anti-Semitism, political hostility to Jews, as a
perfectly compatible part of their left-wing world view.  In most cases, precisely because of that
trope of Jewish power, the conflation of Jews with Capital.  The phenomenon  that in the 1890’s August Bebel, the leader
of Germany’s revolutionary workers party, the SPD, denounced as the socialism
of fools.

Now if nothing else,
this shows us that there is a substantial historical precedent for the
integration of anti-Semitic discourse and ideology into a world view that sees
itself as left-wing.  Those tropes of
Jewish Power, the conflation of Jews with finance, are still there.  If you attend any of the Occupy camps for
example which focussed a lot on finance capital and bankers, you find groups
like Zeitgeist which are not really part of the Left but which inhabit left-wing
spaces making basically anti-Semitic arguments, very thinly veiled anti-Semitic
arguments about Jewish finance. 

[31:32]   I would argue however that contemporary left
anti-Semitism has a different or at least an additional set of historical
roots.  I’ve said already a few times
that what Workers Liberty describes as left anti-Semitism exists as an implied
logic of far left common sense on certain issues.  I want to spell out 4 key elements of what I
think that is, although this list is not exhaustive.

The first is the
argument or implication that Israel is a uniquely reactionary state and that
Jewish nationalism is a uniquely reactionary nationalism.  Now it is our view, Tony disagrees with this,
that the Hebrew speaking Israeli Jewish nation, however you want to describe
that, the Israeli Jewish national group, undeniably constitutes a nation in the
Marxist understanding of that term as opposed to for example a narrow,
exploiting settler caste like the South African Boers.  That’s a very important distinction to us.

However that
national group, class differentiated, originating in geographic situ, not
solely as the product of a colonial land grab but as the product of a refugee
process from an experience of genocide, they are the only national group for
which the far-left’s default programme is that their state must be dismantled
rather than changed in some way, however radical. 

[32:54]   The second argument, following on from that,
is that the Jewish presence in historic Palestine is entirely and uniformily
illegitimate and the product only of a colonial land grab, nothing else and
only resolvable either by the Hebrew speaking population agreeing to be
subsumed as a religious minority in a wider Arab state or implicitly by their
forcible conquest. 

A third element is
that a Jewish or often a Zionist lobby exerts an essentially controlling
influence on either American foreign policy or world affairs or the media or
political affairs in general. 

And finally is the
argument, or the implied demand that Jewish people, uniquely among
ethno-cultural groups, make a totalising break from certain aspects of their historically
developed identity and experience or risk being considered akin to basically
racists.  Perhaps the best example of
that is the campaign waged by some on the left in the 1980’s to have student
unions ban campus Jewish societies which did not explicitly repudiate Zionism
or any species of support for Israel. 

[34:04]   These are the kind of arguments which
aggregate to an exceptionalising attitude not just to the State of Israel but
to aspects of Jewish history and experience which imply an almost inevitable
political hostility to Jews.  We think
these arguments are an inheritance from Stalinism even though many of their
contemporary adherents, I imagine Tony himself, would see themselves as
anti-Stalinists. 

From the 1950’s onwards
the Stalinist states churned out endless anti-Semitic propaganda, purged and
executed alleged Jewish dissidents on the basis of their Zionism and sustained
a steady flow, an industry really of books and newspapers promoting the
argument that Zionism, racism and imperialism were essentially interchangeable
and synonymous terms.  Stalinism, both
directly through the official communist parties and indirectly through a more
diffuse ideological hegemony over the left, dominated much left-wing space and its
ideas on these things found their way into the blood stream of the far
left. 

[35:03]   The Left took, in short, what began as a
Stalinist propaganda trick, confected for reasons of domestic political
advantage for the Stalinist ruling classes and elevated it into a key aspect of
its world view.  Just a note on language
at this point.  I think the way that many
people on the far-left including, having read some of his own writings, Tony
Greenstein himself, talks about Zionists and Zionism does very closely mirror
that Stalinist discourse, about Zionism being an all powerful, hidden hand
behind imperialist policy. 

Substituting the
word Zionist into discourse that is fundamentally about a conspiracy of Jews
controlling American foreign policy does not make that discourse
legitimate.  To use Zionist as a
catch-all term of political abuse in fact prevents rational critique and
discussion of Jewish nationalism.  Tony
seems to have a particularly deep attachment to the word ‘Zio’ in particular
and insists on using it, almost as a provocation. 

The Chakrabarti
Report rightly recommends against the use of this term.  Most ordinary Jews, if they encounter this
term at all, will have done in far-right discourse in the writings of people
like David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  It adds nothing to our analysis and to use it
only looks like a wilful attempt to cause offence to ordinary Jews in a way
that can’t possibly be challenged whatever political prejudices they might hold
but can only alienate them from the Left. 

[36:30]   I understand that Tony has been promoting
tonight’s debate by telling people that he’s been debating a Zionist from the
Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty and as I mentioned at the start of this
speech I wonder whether he considers Jeremy Corbyn, who today reaffirmed his agreement
with the same policy that we hold towards Israel/Palestine, whether he
considers him a Zionist. 

As a matter of
historical fact the revolutionary socialist tradition with which Workers’
Liberty identifies, was always anti-Zionist but it was a rational materialist
anti-Zionism which was accompanied, and in some ways tempered, by an
understanding of the material roots of nationalist impulses and which knew and
knows that people cannot be broken from romantic, reactionary nationalist
ideas, which has responses to periods of violent persecution can and seem to be
perfectly rational, simply by denunciation.

The experiences of
persecution and genocide which turned Zionism from a marginal political concern
into a mass movement are not virtual facts but realities which continue to
resonate in Jewish identity.  I think it
is undeniable that most Jews in the world today do feel some level of affinity
with Israel, however critical they are of its government.  Now that is not an assessment I like, either
as a socialist or as an internationalist Jew. 
It is a state of affairs that I think that the socialist movement should
aspire to change.  But it is a state of
affairs. 

[37:48}   So for example research by academics at City
University in 2015, which interviewed thousands of British Jews, found that 93%
of them felt that Israel forms some part of their identity and 90% support its
continuation as a Jewish state.  So they
are, in other words, Zionists.  But 71%
of them also support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state
alongside Israel, that is to say they are not Greater Israel expansionist
chauvinists and 75% of them say that the West Bank settlements are a major
obstacle to peace.  So at the very least
there are some complexities in that identity that needs teasing out and I don’t
think the Left is ever going to be an agent in helping tease out those
complexities if they approach these people by asserting that essentially they
are fascists.  An analysis that begins and
ends with the contention that Zionism is racism and that Israel is nothing but
a colonial settler state cannot begin to engage with the complexities of this
identity. 

 

It will almost
inevitably lead you to write off the progressive potential of most Jews
alive.  Meaning that the de facto political hostility to Jews as
Jews is one’s only remaining option. 
Now, tangentially is this like saying that because most Jews think a
certain thing, to criticise or disagree with that thing must necessarily be
anti-Semitic.  Obviously that isn’t what
I’m saying and isn’t what I think.

[39:02]   But if one’s politics towards Jewish history
is  based on a historical erasure of the
experiences that led to the development of existing consciousness, then you are
exceptionalising that group of people. 
Socialists should not be in the business of designating entire peoples
as good or bad but rather understanding, in a materialist way, social history
and seeking to develop socialist consciousness. 

It is perhaps worth
saying here, as another aside, while we are talking about issues of
consciousness and understanding, that just as we have a duty, as historical
materialists, to understand the complex and contradictory history of Zionism,
we also have a duty to understand the material basis of the hatred and anger,
often violently expressed, towards Israel and Zionism on the part of many
Palestinians.  A dispossessed people who
have been systematically brutalised by the colonial project of the Israeli
state.  To dismiss their anti-Zionism as
merely anti-Semitism would be as much, if not more of a calumny, as the
dismissal of the Zionism of most Jews as merely racist.  The point is to proceed from a serious
analysis of history on all sides and to aspire to a politics based on
equality. 

[40:14]  I’m going to conclude now by talking about
what we think should form the basis of that politics and what we posit as an
alternative common sense that can tackle the problem of left
anti-Semitism.  As I’ve mentioned a
couple of times, Workers Liberty’s policy on Israel/Palestine is for a 2 state
settlement as part of a transition to wider unity and federation.  That is not because, contrary to Tony’s
claims, we are positively in favour of ethno-chauvinist bases of a national
state but because we are consistent about our support for
self-determination.  The Hebrew speaking
Israeli Jewish nation is undeniably a nation in the Marxist sense and
therefore, from a Marxist point of view, only consists of approaches that
advocate self-determination. 
Consistently we see both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews as distinct
class differentiated national groups and believe that only a framework that
upholds the national rights of both can provide the basis for a solution beyond
nationalisms and nationhood.

[41:10]   We reject the ahistorical analysis maintained
by much of the far left of Zionism as a uniformly racist movement or colonial
movement understanding it as a politically variegated nationalist movement given
a mass character by an oppressed people convinced by the pressure of experience
to seek nationalist, separatist political solutions.  Now again that’s not something we
historically endorse.  The tradition we
identify with was always anti-Zionist. 
But it’s a rational anti-Zionism that understands where the impulse to
seek and adhere to those nationalist/separatist political solutions comes from
and identifies their historical roots. 
We uphold the rational internationalism of the pre-Stalinist
revolutionary socialist movement which opposed Zionism but understood its
context. 

We believe that only
by rejecting an approach based on seeing the world as divided between good and
bad peoples can the problem of left anti-Semitism be ultimately addressed.  We seek to replace the far-Left’s existing
common sense on Israel/Palestine, Zionism, Jewish identity and history with a
new common sense based on consistent democracy and equality.  Ideas that were at the very heart of the
pre-Stalinist Marxist project and which we believe must be urgently
reintegrated.  [42:30]

Mark Sandell (Chair)
I’m going to ask people to indicate by putting their hands up.

Anne M:          It’s really fast and I found it
difficult to keep up.  Can I just ask on
this 2 state solution, how do you think that’s going to come about? 

Mike:     I’m not a member of the Labour Party but I
think that these allegations are almost certainly false because the people
making them do not disguise what they mean by them.  They are very clear that it is people
opposing Zionism who are automatically described as anti-Semitic without any
attempt to prove it.  The media has
uncritically been part of that.  I think
this is a real danger, not just for the left of the Labour Party but for
society more generally because we could be moving to a situation where any
person who speaks against Zionism gets arrested.  Some years ago, the Sussex Police publicly
accused Sussex Action for Peace of being anti-Semitic because they held
demonstrations against Israeli military interventions.  The way the media have excluded from
consideration the idea that it might be racist to oppose an ideology, people
are being called racist for criticising an ideology, a belief system.  There is a historical context to it.  This society, as well as others, is moving in
a more authoritarian direction and a big part of that is the gradual erosion of
free speech and where free speech is delegitimised by being replaced by other
considerations, that take precedence over that, peoples so called right not to
be offended, so I think it is important not to be on the wrong side of history. 

I think we need to
defend the absolute freedom to say what we like about ideologies and belief
systems without the word racism being appropriated and perverted into a
delegitimisation of criticism of ideology. 

Incidentally that
also applies to Islam because a lot of the left has been extremely opportunist
towards Islam and throws the word Islamaphobia around like confetti in the same
way that Zionists throw the word anti-Semitism around.  That’s the main thing I want to say for now.  It’s got to be a consistent position re
racism.  If you pick and choose which
ones you defend then you are basically undermining freedom of speech. 

[46:31]   First of all I met him the other night and I
told him [Tony Greenstein] that I wasn’t his friend!  But I wasn’t his enemy.  On the Archers a couple of week ago, John
Grundy was talking about the Enclosures. 
Some would say that’s gone and has no influence yet  Grundy can raise it. .  So it still has some meaning for people.  It still has resonance.  So when I was listening to the two of them I
found Tony honest and him [Daniel] less honest in that the selection of the
history, his was more selective. 
Recently because of this stuff about whether Israel should exist or not
I started looking at it again.  So are
Jews a nation?  Or are they a religion?  It feels to me that they are primarily a
religion.  I know they’ve been organised
a long time but equally Protestants in the North of Ireland are Protestants and
they are quite clearly distinct ethno-political Northern Irish but they are
Protestans as well.  It is the ideology
of being Protestant that takes them forward and makes them feel that they can
occupy a land.

I read a bit, maybe
selectively, Shlomo Sand [an Israeli historian who wrote Myth of the Jewish
Nation]  Most of the Jews who are in
Israel now or occupied Palestine as I prefer to call it, most of them were
never part of the Diaspora but they came from the Steppes.  So it is a religious group that started to
consider itself a nation or race, but that is a false proposition.  Most of the Jews who considered themselves
Jews were still living in Palestine pre-47 as Semites, just like the
Palestinians.  So taking it forward a
bit, do I think there should be a 2 state solution?  I don’t because I don’t think it will be a
solution  I don’t think it will resolve
it.  The one that keeps coming up, the
same thing in Northern Ireland is the Palestinians are fucking away to a
majority.  Just like the Catholics in
Northern Ireland did!  It’s actually true
and if you listen to some of the political leaders in Israel, that’s the
biggest fear.  That demographic change
will challenge the so-called democratic state. 
They claim that Israel is a democratic state.  Well if it is the Palestinians are going to
overwhelm them and that’s what terrifies the Zionists. 

[50:04}   Becky:          Towards
the end of your talk you referred to Palestinians who were brutalised.  I wanted you to expand a little bit on what
you meant

[51.10]   Labour Party Member (of American origin!)  Mine is more of a
statement or a number of statements.  I
do come from a Jewish background.  I was
the only Jew in a primary school.  I
experienced the demands of killing Christ almost every week.  Sometimes you have to get out of it.  The difficulty I had with what you said was
that there was an underlying acceptance that religion is a basis for forming a
state.  And that does prevail in a large
part of the world.  Not just Israel.  But I think, to me, I’d secularise the lot
and separate church and state.  Because
that’s crucial for how we live together and how we learn to live together.  That’s the fundamental basis of a progressive
view.  This is an important issue.  The Guardian and all the liberal press refuse
to define what Zionism is.  Yes it’s
about the formation of the Jewish state the other side to me is how the only
place that is home for me is Israel.  I
find that offensive.  I have 3 children,
the youngest now is 40.  Their mothers
were non-Jewish.  Hitler would have done
them in as well as me but they’re not recognised by Israel.  So I find the question of Israel being a
democratic state actually very questionable. 

I also find that
there’s a major difference with South Africa because in terms of colonialism,
you actually have people going to South Africa to dominate the Blacks.  They therefore learnt how to talk with them,
maybe not always the best way, but some of the South Africans I’ve met actually
do talk with Blacks.  In Israel it was
different.  It was going there to
actually occupy the land and drive people off the land.  I find all those things quite offensive on
that basis.  So I’m really concerned about
how we get out in the public a better understanding of Zionism.  What is it really on about?  Because there are groups within the Labour
Party that accept Zionism and don’t question it and I think there’s a religious
state there too.  So there are other
religious states.  And we need to bring
back the progressive view of how we push for a secular state.  That’s what I would like to see. 

[54:52]   It is interesting, following on from a couple
of comments, notwithstanding your historically interestingly nuanced discussion
of Zionism, but Corbyn has completely shied away, even in the exchange that one
of you mentioned with Owen Smith, from attempting to disentangle these two
things, because he must realise that it’s political suicide even though he has
done so in the past before his time as leader. 
It seems as though he can’t do it now, he can’t even mention the fact
that it might be necessary to disentangle an anti-Zionist position from an
anti-Semitic position.  That was the
first point and follows on from what you were saying. 

[56:00]   The second thing I found interesting was that
the way neither speaker identified anti-Semitism explicitly with racism. Tony’s
definition was hatred of people because they are Jewish which of course begs
the question, I don’t want to, I don’t agree with what you are saying
respectfully.  Daniel’s anti-Semitism was
chauvinism, which was an interesting choice of words.  I am reminded of Stuart Hall’s Race as a
Signifier (indistinct) and in a way the idea of what it is to be Jewish in my
understanding is a floating signifier. 
So accusations of anti-Semitism that are thrown at those who have both
defined Jewishness through ethnicity and those who have defined Jewishness
through religion in different stages of history. 

I suppose what I’m
getting about in a roundabout way there’s a lot of pussyfooting around these
terms.  Surely they need to be faced head
on. 

Mark Sandell:            What
I plan to do is to take the speakers back for a bit.

[57:50]   Daniel
Randall:       I’ll take the 2
questions that were asked of me directly and then other peoples’
contributions.  You asked how will a 2 state
solution come about.  Well firstly,
unlike Jeremy Corbyn, it might seem like a semantic distinction, I would avoid
the term solution.  I prefer the term
settlement.  Because our view is that a 2
state framework is a transitional step that facilitates wider federation and
unity.   So we’re not talking about 2
states as a solution for all time. 
That’s the first thing I would say.

How will this come
about?  Well through struggle
essentially.  It’s not something which is
going to drop out of the sky and it is something which requires enormous
cataclysmic upheavals of consciousness on the part of the Israeli Jewish
working-class in the first place.  Our
view is a framework whereby the Israeli state concedes or is forced to concede
recognition of a viable independent Palestinian state in contiguous territory
and pays to it significant reparations and reaches an accommodation around the
refugee question that is something that will require significant social
upheaval, across the borders if you like, which is why Workers Liberty in our
activity around this question has placed so much emphasis on supporting
organisations such as the Workers Advice Centre, which is a trade union centre
which organises both Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish workers.  That’s very much our emphasis on struggles in
the here and now which build and develop working-class unity which we see as
the political instrument through which this settlement can be achieved.

[59.42]   This comrade who’s just delivering the drinks
asked what do I mean by Palestinians being brutalised.  You can talk about other terms but I use that
word to try and express the brutality of what we see as the Israeli colonial
project in the occupied Palestinian territories.  It is a highly militarised, permanent war of
occupation which subjugates and systematically brutalises through a regime of
checkpoints and so on the Palestinian population. 

I imagine that
analysis is uncontentious here.  The
Palestinians are a subjugated and brutalised people   That’s what I meant by it.

Becky:  sorry I want to come
back to you on that because when you use that phrase, the Palestinians are
brutalised it implies that it is the Palestinians themselves who have become
brutal through the occupation when in fact it is the brutalisers that are the
brutal ones.

Daniel:  Ok, maybe I need to go back to a
dictionary.  My understanding of the word
‘brutalised’ is to be treated brutally. 

Becky:  Ok that’s absolutely
fine and I wanted to ask you what you meant by it because obviously there’s a
message in Israel that Palestinians are a brutal people. 

Daniel:  I hope I’ve
clarified that now but my understanding of the word brutalised is to be treated
brutally.  If that is a wrong
understanding I will revise that word in future usage.   I wanted to make some comments on other
things that people said and were mentioned. 
This comrade said that neither of us referred to anti-Semitism as
racism.  Anti-Semitism is not one thing.  Historically it has manifested in different
ways.  Hitlerite racialised
anti-Semitism, that is a historical strain which exists.  I wouldn’t place quite so much emphasis as
Tony on how it has disappeared.  It’s
certainly more marginal than it was in the past in this country.  Hasn’t quite disappeared unfortunately.  That is one historical strain but there are
others. 

Political hostility
to Jews on the basis of conflation of Jews with capital and so on.  So I think it is important to recognise a
kind of multiplicity there. 

Questioner:   Sorry I would argue
that racism isn’t one thing either.

Daniel:  That’s also true,
race is a construct isn’t it.  We’re on
shifting semantic terrain there. 

[1:03:34]          This comrade here.  I don’t particularly disagree with anything
you said.  I’m not sure I would share
your emphasis.  You said we are possibly
moving towards a situation where any person who speaks against Zionism could be
arrested for hate speech.  I simply don’t
think that is a reasonable assessment of the balance of forces or where we are.  That we are at a point where anyone making
any criticism of Zionism might be arrested and I think to suggest that confers
on Zionism a quite undue level of power. 

Some of the other
comments that were made such as you cannot be racist if you are only
criticising an ideology or a belief system. 
It’s not as simple as that.  A lot
of people on the left, and the right too, have the view that it’s not possible
for anti-Zionism to be anti-Semitic because it is anti-Zionism and Zionism is
completely separable from Jewish religion or Jewish ethnicity.  In fact it is possible, manifestly possible,
to criticise an ideology or belief system in an anti-Semitic way.  Just as in fact, although I agree about your
critique of Islamaphobia, it is possible to express anti-Muslim bigotry and
anti-Muslim racism while superficially you are only critiquing the ideology or
belief system of Islam.  These things can
overlap and often do.

On the far Right
there is substantial anti-Zionist discourse which is manifestly
anti-Semitic.  Tony’s claim that people
on the far Right who oppose Israel are really marginal now and basically everyone
on the far-Right is basically a Zionist is nonsense.  Go and read it.  Go and read what people like David Duke have
to say about Israel and Zionism.  The
evidence is there. 

[1:05:34:          Comrade who’s gone, I’m not sure I
really understood everything he was saying. I found some of the stuff about who
are the real Jews.  It sounded pretty
problematic to me.  I’m not sure I
understood it.  I do want to pick up on
his comment about [we are informed that he is on his way back!] I was saying I
didn’t quite understand your comment about who are the real Jews.  That sounded to me somewhat problematic.  I don’t feel I grasped it to say more than
that.  One thing I did want to respond to
specifically when you talked about historical selectiveness.  I’d be interested to know what aspects of my
account you found historically selective. 
I think that there is a huge degree of historical selectiveness at work
in the default historical analysis that prevails on the far-left about Zionism
and about Israel. 

So if you listen to
the way Tony and others speak about Zionism it’s a history that erases for
example the role of Zionists in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  It’s a history that erases the role of the
Zionist detachment in the Red Army in the civil war.  It’s an analysis that erases from history,
which reduces the foundation of the State of Israel to a matter solely of
colonial land grab and erases the history of the experience of the boat people
of the 1940’s, refugees from genocide with literally nowhere else to go, the
doors of the world literally shut in their face and ended up in Palestine
because that was literally the only place they could go.  An analysis which writes them out of the
picture or worse suggests that what they were engaged in was a process of
hawkish colonial land grab I think is obscene. 

[1:08:07]          Finally the comrade in the corner
talked about religion as the basis for forming a state.  That is not the issue when we are talking
about Israel/Palestine.  Historically,
actually, a lot of the early Zionists were very secular and opposed, there were
a substantial body in early Zionism and contemporary Zionist ideology which
sees itself as secular, as modern and so on. 
So I don’t think the issue is that Israel is a religious state.  That is an issue.  Certainly I’m in favour of Israel being
secular and I’m in favour of any future Israeli state or any binational Israeli
Jewish/Arab state being constitutionally secular.  But I think that to reduce this to a matter
of religion substantially misses the point.

[1:09:14]          Tony
G:     The last point
is the only point on which I have some agreement with Daniel on.  Zionism is not a question of religion
although often Zionists have often pretended it is.  Yes, many of the early Zionists were
atheists.  That is the irony.  They based their claim to Palestine on a god
whose existence they denied.  That was
the absurdity.  They said that the Jews
had a historical, biblical right to the land of Palestine even though the god
that gave them that land did not exist! 
Zionism was, and that was how they saw it, a form of collective
assimilation.  They would create another
nation just like the French, the British etc. 
That was the idea.  Of course it
didn’t come to pass because Zionism was not created in historical
isolation.  It began as a settler,
colonial entity.  If you read for example
the Diaries of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, an excellent
passage which I quoted in an open letter to the Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel
only a few weeks ago.  When Herzl wrote
to Cecil Rhodes, after whom Rhodesia was named, who was one of the key
architects of white supremacy in southern Africa, Herzl asked ‘how then do I
happen to turn to you since this is an out of the way matter for you.  How indeed. 
Because it is something colonial.’ [Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.1194]. 

If you look at the
early writings of all the Zionists for example David Ben-Gurion who was the key
Labour Zionist, he was Chair of the Jewish Agency [the Zionist government in
waiting] he was the first and longest Prime Minister of Israel, though I think
Netanyahu has now overtaken him, he spoke of the colonies and the
colonists.  Today Zionism calls itself a
Jewish national liberation movement, but this is an adaptation to the zeitgeist of the moment.  They never used to call themselves it.  When colonialism was the in-thing, when
colonialism was seen as a good thing, a way of civilising the backward peoples,
then Zionists were colonialists.  Of
course they formed an alliance with British imperialism under Arthur Balfour
[The Balfour Declaration, November 1917]. 

[1:11:55]          I’m accused of giving a selective
history of Zionism.  Apparently Israel or
what has become Israel, was a refugee state for the boat peoples in the
1940s.  This is absolutely historically
illiterate.  When the Jews fled from the
pogroms of Czarist Russia between the mid-19th century and 1914, 2.5
million went to Britain or the United States, that’s why the United States has
some 5-6 million Jews.  You know how many
went to Palestine?  Less than
50,000.  They were the ideologues of the
Zionist movement. 

They didn’t escape
persecution by going to Palestine, they went as part of a specific settler
colonial population.  The difference
between Palestine and South Africa, why Israel is worse than South Africa ever
was under Apartheid was that the colonists in South Africa went to exploit the
Black labour and people of  South Africa.  The Zionists had a different idea
altogether.  They went to exclude the
indigenous populace, first from the economy and then from the land
altogether.  They had no use for them and
the model is more akin to Australia and the United States than South Africa, so
Israel which is an apartheid state is actually far worse, as Archbishop Desmond
Tutu says, than South Africa ever was. 

[1:13:30]          Again I don’t accept this idea that
I’ve falsified the history of Zionism. 
You made a reference to the Warsaw ghetto.  I don’t doubt that some Zionists Mordechai
Anielwicz [Hashomer Hatzair] who led the Jewish Fighting Organisation [ZOB] and
others from Left Poalei Zion in particular fought against the Nazis.  But Anielwicz himself said as quoted in
Yisrael Gutman’s book on the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto [The Jews of Warsaw
1939-1943, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982] that we wasted our time in the
Zionist political parties doing absolutely no good [education work, on
kibbutzim and farms] when we should have been organising.  The Zionists were part of the greater
resistance.  They were not fighting
because they were Zionists but in spite of the fact they were Zionists.  Indeed those who controlled Judenrat (Jewish
Council) which collaborated with the Nazis were predominantly Zionist, as they
were throughout Eastern Europe.  Anyone
who doubts that should read the most comprehensive book by a Zionist, Isaiah
Trunk.  Two-thirds of the Jewish Councils
were composed of Zionists.  Because they
were the bourgeois elements. 

The major opposition
to anti-Semitism in Poland and elsewhere, Poland contained over 3 million Jews,
90% of whom were exterminated in the holocaust, was the Bund which was a Jewish
socialist anti-Zionist party.  They hated
the Zionists.  They saw them as
anti-Semites in a Jewish guise.  In 1938,
the last free elections in Poland, the local council elections, in Warsaw
itself, out of the 20 Jewish council seats, because seats were reserved for
Jews as a national minority, 17 were won by the Bund and just 1 was won by the
Zionists.  The fact is that the Zionists
became extremely unpopular because as Isaac Deutscher said [the non-Jewish Jew
& other essays] they seemed to validate everything that the anti-Semites
said.  The anti-Semites said get out and
the Zionists said yes we agree with you. 
We will get out.  Zionism was
unique among Jewish movements, whether liberal or communist, in accepting the
idea of the anti-Semites that Jews did not belong in those societies.  Therefore they posited the solution that the
anti-Semites themselves welcomed. 

When Herzl wrote the
Jewish State [Der Judenstaat] in 1895, he sought out a favourable review from
the leader of the anti-Dreyfussards, [Eduord Drumont], who edited La Libre
Parole.  He sought out a review from this
leader of the anti-Dreyfussards because he agreed with Herzl.

As regards two
states.  Is Corbyn a Zionist?  No. 
But he sometimes tends to have a rubber backbone.  He is pushed into a position from which it is
hard to escape.  If Corbyn had said, at
the very beginning of this anti-Semitism nonsense that:

[1:45:12]         Anne
M           My point wasn’t that
I don’t have the debate.  I don’t want to
be debating with comrades on the left about left-anti-Semitism I want to be
debating with comrades on the left, forming a collective unity about Israeli racism
and apartheid because that is what we should be absolutely clear on.  And I also want us to be debating the 300%
increase in hate crimes against Muslims rather than this peripheral left
anti-Semitism.  It seems disgraceful that
so much time is taken up on something when our focus should be on something far
more pressing, far more urgent and far more important. 

[1:46:16]         Tony
Greenstein:  As regards the point
on Nazi-Zionist collaboration in the ghettos, you referred I think to Hungary in
particular, it’s a very good example. 
Because in Hungary on March 15 1944 the Nazi troops entered the country
and occupied it.  The first thing they
did was to set up a Jewish Council and they worked with the Zionist Relief and
Rescue Committee under Rudolf Kasztner. 
Without going through the history Kasztner basically suppressed the
Auschwitz Protocols which laid out the details of Auschwitz which wasn’t known
as an extermination camp, it was thought of as a labour camp until then.  He reached a deal with Eichmann for a train
out of Hungary for 1,684 Jews, primarily Zionists and the Jewish Council and
the Zionist Rescue Committee (Vadah) would collaborate in the rounding up, the
marking out and identification of Jews who would then be transported to
Auschwitz.

That is what
happened.  After the war allegations of
collaboration were made, not by anti-Zionists but by Jewish refugees who had
survived Auschwitz who were in Israel. 
It was called the Kasztner trial. 
Between 1954 and 1958 Israel was rocked by the revelations in this
trial.  Kasztner was the representative,
the leader of Hungarian Zionism and the representative in Hungary of the Jewish
Agency.  He went to Nuremberg in 1947 to
testify on behalf of 7 leading Nazis, including Hermann Krumey, who was
Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary he was the person in charge of organising the
deportations which led to the extermination of nearly half a million Hungarian
Jews.  So that is simply for the
record.  In the ghettos the Jews hated
the Judenrat (Jewish Councils). 
Rumkowski for example a Zionist who was the Chair of the Judenrat in the
Lodz ghetto, the second biggest ghetto in Poland, when he was eventually
deported on the trains he wasn’t killed in the gas chambers he was killed by
fellow deportees for the role he played in the deportations and in particular
of Jewish children. 

I make a distinction
between the leaders of the Zionist movement primarily outside Europe and
individual Zionists.  Individual Zionists
often played a very heroic and brave role. 
I have no doubt about that.  I
mentioned Mordechai Anielwicz.  I could
mention Moshe Krausz in Budapest for example who did fight hand in hand with
the Bund and the Jewish communists but the Zionist movement outside Europe
played a completely different role. 

You talk about the
refugees and the boat people, the Zionist movement fought to   close down places where Jews could be rescued
in order that they could only go to Palestine.    They were used as a battering ram to open
the gates of Palestine which had been closed by the British in 1939.  Freiland in Australia, Santo Domingo which
had offered to take 100,000 Jews at the Evian Conference in 1938.   [See Post-Ugandan Zionism on Trial, pp.
218-234, Shabtai beit-Zvi, 1991, Tel Aviv]

The role of the
Zionist movement was absolutely despicable. 
Throughout the Holocaust the Zionist movement denied there was a
holocaust.  Even when, eventually in
November 23 1942 they issued a statement accepting there was a holocaust they
almost immediately went back on it and started quoting Nazi papers such as
Ostland to the effect that there were 53 ghettos in Poland and the majority of
Jews were still alive when in fact the opposite was the case.  [Beit Zvi, pp. 79-81]

As regards Israel I
am in favour of the destruction of the Israeli state.  Because it is a unique state based on the
oppression of a particular ethnicity because yes Palestinians are an ethnicity
just like Israeli Jews.  Does that
therefore mean I am in favour of the destruction or the driving into the sea of
Israeli Jews?  Absolutely not.  I was in favour of the destruction of the
South African apartheid state.  Does that
mean I believed that white South Africans should have been driven out and
destroyed?  Of course not.   There’s a difference between a state and the
people who live under that state.  It’s a
very basic and simple concept.  Only
fascists identify the people of a state with the state itself. 

As for how the
solution is to be attained, the simple answer is I don’t have a crystal
ball.  What I do know is that Israel
exists primarily today because it is supported by the United States.  Not, as Daniel said, because I believe in a
powerful Zionist or Jewish lobby in the United States.  I don’t subscribe to those theories at
all.  I don’t believe the reason that the
US supports Israel because of the Zionist lobby.  The Zionist lobby is a consequence of that
support.  The United States supports
Israel because it is in its material interests to support Israel as the hammer
of the Arab nations. 

Alexander Haig,
Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State said Israel is cheap at the price.  It’s an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the
most volatile region of the world.  $4
billion a year, compared to the US military budget it’s absolutely
nothing.  And Israel tests and refines
those weapons in use against the Palestinians. 
It’s an ideal situation.

How will revolution
occur?  Undoubtedly it will have to occur
in the Arab states against the Arab regimes which are also the allies of
imperialism.  It will be revolution in
the Arab East which will eventually see the overthrow of the Zionism.  It won’t happen in Israel because the
Palestinians militarily are not in the same position as Black South
Africans. 

Other
questions.  ‘Zio’ that’s simple I only
use it on Twitter usually when I’m being accused of being a ‘self hater’ or
something like that.  But it’s also to
make a point.  Zionism and Zionists, the
racists, will not define my narrative. 
‘Zio’ is short for Zionist or Zionism. 
Zionism is a political ideology. 
A Zionist is someone who supports that political ideology.  The majority of Zionists in the world are
probably Christians.  40 million of them
are in the USA.  Quite how I’m being
racist by using the term ‘zio’ I simply don’t understand.

As for identity and
Jewish identity today it has changed. 
The majority of Jews, not 93%, identify with Israel, I accept.  In the City University survey you mention
Daniel, it’s interesting that 59% of Jews identify as Zionist and 31% said they
weren’t Zionists.  That actually 59% is
down 12% over 5 years.  So I think that
Zionism does have, or is beginning to have, a bad name even within the Jewish
community.  [The
Attitudes of British Jews towards Israel]

[1:53:30]         But if the majority
of Jews identify with Israel so what? 
It’s a reactionary identity.  If a
whole section of Black or Muslim people identify with FGM do we back off and
say that’s fine, it would be racist to oppose you?  Of course not.  If a section of Islam believes that the Burka
is part and parcel of their religious practice, should I therefore say that’s
fine.  Of course not.  You oppose religious rituals that are
reactionary.  If people identify with a
state that is thoroughly racist and reactionary then you oppose that.

MarkSandell asks a question!   Would you say destroy Iran, Pakistan,
religious states?  Smash them.  Would you hold my
banner and say that?

Tony Greenstein:      I wouldn’t hold your
banner Mark.  There’s a difference and
I’ll tell you what the difference is.  Iran
is a reactionary Islamic state.  Likewise
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.  But there is
a key difference. The Islamic religion is used to oppress other Muslims.  It doesn’t grant them privileges, quite the
contrary.  It provides a rationale for
brutal police states.  In Israel being
Jewish entitles you to privilege.  I have
the right to go to Israel because I’m Jewish and claim citizenship.  A Palestinian who has left Israel cannot go
back.  They are not allowed to, they have
no right to return.  There is a complete
difference between Israel and the Islamic states.  The latter are not settler colonial
states.  Of course I’m in favour of the
destruction of all states but there are some states which are worse than
others.  Those which are worse, or in a
different category are ethno-national/religious nationalist states. 

Incidentally I don’t
consider Zionism a form of Jewish nationalism. 
The Bund in Europe was a Jewish nationalist party.  The Jews formed a national minority in
Eastern Europe.  I draw a distinction
between a nationalist movement and nationalism. 
[The Nazis were a German nationalist group, they weren’t representatives
of German nationalism]

[1:55:55]         As regards
anti-Zionism being a product of Stalinism I’m sorry I have never read any of those
Stalinist tracts. I completely disagree. 
My anti-Zionism comes from the Bund and Jewish and Israeli
revolutonaries.  Not from Stalinism.  I agree that Stalinism, like the Slansky
trial in Czechoslovakia or the Doctors Plot in Moscow were anti-Semitic.  But that was peculiar to those regimes.  It has nothing to do with ‘left
anti-Semitism’ in this country or anti-Zionism. 

[1:56:40]         One other thing
about anti-Semitism is that anti-Semitism itself has changed.  Historically anti-Semitism was feudal anti-Semitism
based on or rationalised by Christianity, Jews killed Christ and so on.  What transformed it into a murderous,
genocidal form of racism was the development of anti-Semitism not as a
religious form of racism but a form of racism based on the ‘scientific’
doctrines of race which developed in the last 19th century to
justify colonialism.  That was the whole
point of Hitler’s anti-Semitism.  Even if
you converted from Judaism to Christianity you were still considered to be
Jewish by race – a Christian Jew.  That
was an entirely new phenomenon.  You
would still go to the gas chambers. 
Whereas historically, for people like Martin Luther, once a Jew had
converted they were Christian.  Their
soul had been saved.  They were no longer
subject to any discrimination because they were Jewish.  There should be a sharp distinction. Hitler
borrowed the memory of Jews’ role in feudalism and Jews in feudalism often
prospered, they were the oppressors of the peasants.  That is a different debate.  But one has to look at the Jewish Question
historically and materially.  Jews were
not eternally oppressed by anti-Semitism. 
Sometimes they were, more often they weren’t.  They were often the oppressor. 

Today there is a
majority Jewish identity which is Zionist but there is quite a large and
significant Jewish identity, particularly among young Jews which is based on
opposition to Zionism.  And that is a
very health and anti-racist identity. 
And that is where I intend to leave it. 
Thank you.

[1:58:35]         Daniel
Randall           I don’t know how
many of those young Jews you are directly engaging with Tony but I can pretty
confidently assure you that they would not identify with your discourse, your
analysis, or your policy positions. 
Certainly it is true that there is a development away from reflexive
support for Israel amongst a layer of young Jews which is very healthy but that
is not one which accepts your view, to quote you, you said that Israel is a
uniquely reactionary state. [racist – TG] 
It’s not one which accepts your view that Zionism is a uniquely
reactionary form of whatever you call it if its not nationalism. 

So it would be some
time before your views occupy any kind of hegemony among Jewish communities in
this country.  I will try and respond to
a few of the things that were said in the discussion and in Tony’s summation.  It was an incredible sleight of hand you said
I accused you of erasing the experiences of the boat people but then went on to
talk of refugees from Czarist pogroms. 
Precisely again doing the very thing I’m accusing you of.  The point about the boat people is that Deutscher’s
phrase, Israel is the liferaft state. 
The experience of the boat people shows that the development and the
arrival of a significant Jewish population in historic Palestine was not the
accumulation of colonial settlers going there over a period of years. 

It’s glaring
historical illiteracy, to pick up your phrase, to ignore that.  That is the origin of a substantial Jewish
population in that part of the world. 
Refugees from the holocaust.  That
is simply the case.  To deny that, to
erase that reality from one’s understanding of how Israel came to exist as a
state and how it came to occupy the position it occupies in contemporary Jewish
identity, to ignore all that, to erase all that, to say it doesn’t exist or is
irrelevant again can only lead you into political hostility to most Jews. 

You quoted various
separatist things that Zionist leaders had said, I mean there’s all sorts of
precedents for romantic nationalist separatism in those movements, Garveyite,
back to Africa nationalism, the 
accommodation of various  Black
nationalists in their attempted entente with various fascists in America, all
sorts of precedents exist certainly they’re wrong, certainly they’re
reactionary and worthy of condemnation, but to extrapolate from those
conclusions to the entirety of a complex, politically variegated movement is
wrong and again to say essentially that Zionism collaborated with the holocaust

Tony Greenstein – I didn’t. 

Daniel:  Ok, I’m speaking in
broad brush strokes, is a form of calumnous victim blaming which entirely
muddies the historical picture.  Though
here and there individual Zionists might have played a good role but on the
whole the Zionist movement collaborated, that is what you said, is simply not
borne out by examining the historical record. 
The Resistance Council in the Warsaw Ghetto included not just one or two
Zionist individuals but included Zionist political parties.  An analysis of the history of the movement
has to recognise its political variegation.  

[2:02:44]         You also said that
its very important not to identify a state with the people of that state.  It seems that’s precisely what your analysis
does by erasing entirely from the picture any progressive potential or agency
of the Israeli Jewish working-class. 
Socialists should not be in the business of assigning people, any group
of people, with a trans-historical irredeemably reactionary role and it seems
like that’s what you do in relation to the Israeli Jewish nation which
undeniably has a working-class.  That is
not a narrow settler caste, like the South Africa Boers.  Your whole analysis is predicated on
understanding it as basically akin to South Africa but it’s simply not the
same.  The Israeli Jewish nation is not a
narrow settler caste. It is a class differentiated national group.

And to respond to
what you were saying, the idea that Jews globally constitute a transnational
Jewish nation, that is romantic nationalist nonsense.  But in Israel, from a Marxist point of view,
in terms of understanding a nation as a people occupying a shared geographical
territory, with a common language, common history and common experience and
understanding themselves to be a nation, undeniably there is an Israeli Jewish
nation.

[2:04:05]         Now we might talk
about ways that identity can be overcome and certainly I would hope that any
future Israeli state that was part of a 2 state settlement would be a bi-national
state of both Jews and Arabs.  But to get
there requires an avoidance of the erasure of the progressive potential of the
Israeli Jewish working-class that Tony undertakes.

A couple of people
have implied that anti-Semitism is so marginal as to be not worthy of
attention.  I think this is wrong for two
reasons.  Firstly you talked about hate
crimes against Muslims increasing. 
Anti-Semitic hate crime is also increasing. 

Anne Mitchell – that is not what the CST says.

Daniel:  Umm, maybe we are
looking at different statistics. 

Rebecca:        They make the
statistics.

Daniel:  Firstly the CST
aren’t the only people who make the statistics and there are substantial
statistical records to show that anti-Semitic hate crimes between 2014, 2015
increased dramatically.

Tony Greenstein:      Why?  Operation Protective Edge.

Daniel:  Of course, it’s
their own fault. 

Tony Greenstein:      That’s
what the CST says!

Daniel:  So…. That needs to
be taken account of as well.  Secondly
look there’s a question of ideology.  The
fact that an element of chauvinism or bigotry or racism has become marginal
doesn’t mean it’s no longer worthy of discussion or that it can’t reoccur as
we’ve agreed anti-Semitism has varied and fluctuated throughout history.  The idea that because it is marginal in a
particular moment we should stop talking about it or acknowledging it is
extremely dangerous. 

[2:06:10]:        I don’t share Tony’s
incredibly generalising view of Jews as a uniformly privileged layer of the
white community, I can’t remember the exact phrase, that isn’t
straightforwardly true in this country and certainly not true in other
countries, so to dismiss anti-Semitism as something not worthy of discussion
because it is marginal or because it only happens to rich people, again is
something which makes me extremely uncomfortable.

And finally on your
point about whether we should have this debate in the Labour Party or at
all.  If we don’t have this debate these
issues are just going to keep coming up again and again.  I think Greg is absolutely right that we
should be having this debate inside the Labour Party.  The Labour Party should be a space where
different positions and perspectives on Israel/Palestine and on all of these
questions can be debated and discussed openly. 
I think it is part of the problem on the Right and the Left not that
there’s too much debate on these questions but not enough.  Actually a debate like this, which tackles
these issues head on, you say you are tired of it, is extremely rare.  I think that the only way we are going to get
anywhere on these issues, me and Tony aren’t going to convince each other but
we both aspire to shape a political hegemony in the movement around us and the
only way to do that is by having this kind of debate so the problem is, far
from there being too much debate the problem is not enough.  That is why we wanted to have a debate
tonight and why we want to have such debates within the wider movement.  [2:07:56]