Emblazoned across the New Statesman’s masthead is the slogan ‘Free thinking since 1913’. Unsurprisingly
it is a lie but all organisations like to wrap themselves in a comfort blanket.
In the 1930’s it was best known for its support for Stalinism, the purges
included. Its commitment to ‘free thinking’ did not extend to publication of
George Orwell’s dispatches from the Spanish civil war, because they criticised
the Stalinist attacks on the Anarchists and POUM.

Born in the womb of Fabianism, the New Statesman soon abandoned
even a token relationship to socialism, hence why its current editor Jason
Cowley claims it is ‘celebrated for its
progressive and liberal politics.’ The New Statesman does not do socialism
or anti-capitalism, though a couple of its contributors would probably claim a
passing attachment to socialist politics.

The New Statesman was formed
in 1913 by Beatrice and Sydney Webb and it was as devoted to the British Empire
as the Tories. Unlike the Tories who made no secret of their belief that they
intended the Empire to last forever, a source of perpetual unearned riches, they
were the moral wing of imperialism which held that colonialism was an act of
self-sacrifice. The New Statesman believed that Britain was holding the
colonies in trust for the natives as and until they had reached the requisite
stage of civilisation.

Sydney Webb was the prime representative of this wing
of moral imperialism. As Lord Passfield, he was Secretary of State for the
Colonies and the Dominions in the 1929-31 MacDonald government. In this
capacity he issued the Passfield White
Paper in response to the Report of the Hope-Simpson Report which arose out
of the 1929 Arab riots. It recommended drastic reductions in Jewish immigration
to Palestine. For anyone wanting to understand the background to the apartheid nature
of the State of Israel today then this Report is required reading.

The New Statesman has a long and inglorious record of
support for Zionism. Perhaps its most openly racist editor was Richard Crossman
(1970-72, though Paul Johnson runs him a close second), who served as Housing
Minister in the Wilson government. In a
memorial lecture to Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President, in 1959 Crossman
regretfully noted in respect to the colonists, that “No one”, at least until the 20th century, had 

Crossman’s views about the rights and duties of
settler colonialism fitted in with the moral debt that the civilised nations
owed to their backward brothers. Settler colonialism, be it in southern Africa
or the Middle East was seen as the most efficacious means by which the natives
might be civilised. If that meant wiping out some of them, as a way of teaching
good manners, then that was a price worth paying.

Zionism was the bastard offspring of the New
Statesman’s political and cultural outlook. It was seen as redressing an age
old wrong, fitted in with the romantic imperialist view of the ‘restoration’ of
the Jews and of course was of benefit to British imperial interests in the Middle
East. 

It was only under the editorship of Bruce Page
(1978-82) and his successor Hugh Stephenson (1982-86) that the Palestinians
began to get more sympathetic coverage in the New Statesman, in part because of
the Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when over 20,000 Lebanese were killed. 

Supporting
Zionism today

Although
the New Statesman carries a few articles today on particular Israeli outrages, it
is a firmly Zionist publication. What the New Statesman will never do is
question the reasons why Israel behaves as it does.  It will not question Zionism, the ideology
and movement that  created the Jewish,
i.e. Apartheid nature of Israel. It is perfectly happy to carry articles on the
Gaza massacres, when Israel gunned down over 120 unarmed Palestinians, especially
when penned
by the far-Right editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, but it won’t
ask why there is land and education segregation in Israel.

Pollard
is well qualified to write articles on the murder of Palestinians being a member
of the cold war Henry Jackson Society, former Editor of the Daily Express and
someone who declared
that Polish anti-Semite Michal Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism
and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ 

Kaminski
supported the campaign to rehabilitate the name of Jedwabne, a village in Poland
where, in 1941, up to 1600 Jews had been herded into a barn which was then set
alight, by their fellow Poles.  As
Pollard explained, although an anti-Semite Kaminski was also a strong supporter
of Israel.

Supporting
the Anti-Semitism Witchhunt in Labour 

It
is no surprise that the New Statesman has been one of the most fervent
supporters of the right-wing Labour Zionist campaign to paint the Labour Party as
overrun by anti-Semitism. What is surprising is that this dedication extends to
providing PR coverage for different factions within the Jewish Labour Movement,
the British wing (or sister party) of
the racist Israeli Labour Party.

Early
last week a report appeared in the Jewish Chronicle stating that  the JLM’s war criminal Chair, Ivor Caplin
(Defence Minister at the time of the Iraq War), after having met with Labour’s General
Secretary, Jennie Formby, was happy with the Labour Party’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct.  And so he should have been since it rested on
an amended form of the fake IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

However
when news of this leaked out Caplin was subject to furious attacks
by his fellow Zionists. What his opponents objected to in the new Code was best
put by Pollard:

‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these
bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism
of Israel can be antisemitic.’ [The Jewish Labour Movement did not approve Labour’s
anti-Semitism guidelines. Here’s why]

Caplin
had clearly forgotten that the anti-Semitism witchhunt had nothing to do with anti-Semitism
as opposed to Zionism and Israel. Even worse he didn’t seem to grasp that the
purpose of the anti-Semitism witch-hunt was that it had to continue unti Corbyn’s
resignation.

You
might expect that the New Statesman would cover these things fairly and
accurately.  That would be naive.  Instead it ran a PR puff on behalf of Caplin’s
critics The Jewish Labour Movement did not approve
Labour’s anti-Semitism guidelines. Here’s why.

The
article by Katz and Langleben, the latter a councillor who had managed to wage
a successful campaign to convince the electors in West Hendon that Labour was anti-Semitic.  So successful was he that they decided to
oust him! Their article is a classic example of what Noam Chomsky called the manufacturing of consent. It rests on the taken
for granted assumption that there is, what the authors call an ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ in the Labour
Party.  The only crisis is the continuing
levelling of false accusations by the Israeli states surrogates.

For
the past three years the Labour Party has been the subject of a concerted
campaign of false and bogus accusations of anti-Semitism.  It began with allegations
that Corbyn had associated with a holocaust denier and its most recent manifestation
was the bogus
issue of Corbyn having defended an allegedly anti-Semitic mural on the
grounds of free speech.

What
is the role of the New Statesman?  Has it
ever critically evalued the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign which stretches from
those well known anti-racist papers, the Sun and Mail to the neo-liberal
Guardian and the BBC? Is the New Statesman’s role simply to echo the
‘anti-Semitism’ drumbeat of the mass media?

There
seems to be an open door in the New Statesman to any propaganda which
reinforces the wall to wall media consensus that the Labour Party is overrun
with anti-Semitism.

It
is no surprise that in the wake of the attack and pending demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, to say
nothing of Israel’s gunning down of over 120 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, that
Zionist organisations should resort to the tried and trusted tactic of alleging
anti-Semitism. 

The
JLM, of which Langleben and Katz are senior officers, is affiliated to the
World Zionist Organisation, whose Land Settlement Division funds the settlement
expansion in Palestine that dictates the demolition of Palestinian villages.
Did it ever occur to the New Statesman that this might have some bearing on the
PR puff that constituted Langleben/Katz’s article?  Did it ever occur to Jasper
Jackson. who commissioned the article  to ask
how the JLM’s affiliation to the WZO squares with their professed support for
a  two state solution?

When
I spoke to Jasper he didn’t seem to have a clue about the issues.  He was unable to even comprehend what the
significance of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was and why Zionist groups
were so keen on it rather than the 6 word definition in the OED.

I
therefore submitted a response to the Katz/Langleben’s PR puff.  According to Jasper it was unsuitable.  Why? 
Well of course he had no answer.

Tony
Greenstein 

Although flawed Labour’s Anti-Semitism Code at least makes an
attempt to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

I can quite
understand why Mike Katz and Adam Langleben of the Jewish Labour Movement are
busily trying to repair the damage caused by their Chair, Ivor Caplin giving his
assent to Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct.  However the
internal difficulties of the JLM are less important than the principal
issues at stake such as the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in the battle
against the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party.

Anti-Semitism
is remarkably easy to define. It is not a mystery. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary it is ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’.  According to the definition drawn up by Oxford academic Dr Brian Klug “Antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews
as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.”  If you ask the man (or woman) on the Clapham
Omnibus what is anti-Semitism they will tell you that it is someone who doesn’t
like Jews and they would be right.  Anti-Semitism
has nothing to do with opposition to Zionism or criticism of Israel.

Katz,
Langleben and the pro-Israel Board of Deputies are insistent that the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism is the only
definition that matters. Why?  It is a
strange definition that is over 450 words long. As Sir Stephen Sedley, the
Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote,
the IHRA definition ‘fails the first test
of any definition: it is indefinite.’

The reason
why the IHRA is so long is because it attempts to conflate anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism. It is therefore not at all surprising that the Zionist movement
in this country has reacted furiously to Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of
Conduct which removes 4 of the 11 ‘illustrations’ of anti-Semitism in the IHRA.

In the words
of Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen
Pollard, the problem is that instead of adopting the complete
definition ‘Labour has excised the parts
which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’ For
all of Katz and Langleben’s sophistry, their concerns relate to this one
central point.

Katz and
Langleben refer to the widespread adoption of the IHRA whilst failing to mention
that the University College Union and Liberty have both rejected it because of
the threat to freedom of speech that it poses. 
Anti-racist and Muslim groups have also opposed it because it does
nothing in the fight against racism.  The
fact that the College of Policing has adopted it, given the record of police
racism in this country, is not encouraging.

Yes it is
true that 31 countries have adopted it, but the fact that these countries
include the anti-Semitic governments of Hungary and Poland, to say nothing of
the V-4 Visegrad Group should be a source of shame not pride.  What conclusions should we draw about a
definition of anti-Semitism that Viktor Orban can sign up to?  This is the same Orban who believes that
Admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary during the war, who presided over
the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz, was an ‘outstanding
statement’.

The government
of Poland too, which made it a criminal
offence to mention the fact that thousands of Poles collaborated with the Nazi
murder of Jews is also happy with the IHRA.

Perhaps
Katz and Langleben would care to read Chemi Shalev’s, Menachem
Begin Would Be Ashamed of Netanyahu’s Whitewash of Hungary’s anti-Semitism,
Poland’s Holocaust Revisionism?  in Ha’aretz.
 Shalev was referring to the recent
endorsement, by the Prime Minister of Israel, of an accord with Poland’s
anti-Semitic government which endorses a policy of  covering up small matters like the burning
alive of 1,600 members of the Jewish community of Jedwabne , who 77 years ago were
herded into a barn by fellow Poles. This is the real anti-Semitism that Katz
and Langleben are silent about.

I don’t hear the JLM
protesting about the invitation
that Netanyahu has extended to his friend Viktor Orban, to make a state visit
to Israel later this summer.  Meanwhile
Jan Tomasz Gross, Anna Bikont and the other historians who uncovered what
happened in Jedwabne, Radzilow and other villages in Poland face being sued in
Polish courts.

Katz and Langleben’s
allegation that ‘The Jewish community have clearly outlined their own definition of Jew
hatred’ by which they mean the IHRA is
simply untrue.  If you were to stop most
Jewish people in the street and ask them what anti-Semitism was they would say
hatred of Jews not criticism of Israel. What Langleben and Katz mean refer to
as the Jewish community is the Zionist movement.

Nor is it
true that Poale Zion/JLM have been the Labour Party’s Jewish affiliate since
1920.  It has been Labour’s Zionist
affiliate. This is part of the shameful record of Labour’s support for the
British Empire.  Unfortunately the Labour
Party supported the colonisation by the Zionist movement of Palestine as it did
many other colonial adventures.  The JLM
is not a group that anti-Zionist and anti-racist Jews are able to join.  Indeed the JLM is open to non-Jews who are
Zionists.

Labour’s
new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct has many flaws, not least the fact that it rests
on a cut down version of the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism.  You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s
ear. Instead of amending the definition they should have junked it altogether.
Anti-Semitism is not a mystery that needs a special definition.

At a time
when the far-Right in Britain, Europe and America overwhelmingly supports the
Israeli state and Zionism and when the founder of the alt-Right, neo-Nazi Richard
Spencer declares himself a White
Zionist the attempt of Katz and Langleben to pretend that their opposition
to Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct has anything to do with fighting
hatred of Jews is risible.

Tony
Greenstein  

The original article by Mike Katz and Adam Langleben is The Jewish Labour Movement did not approve Labour’s anti-Semitism
guidelines. Here’s why

See also: