It’s
a very simple argument.  Israel is an apartheid state. If you support
the world’s only apartheid state then you are no anti-fascist. You can’t oppose
the Islamaphobic far-Right whilst supporting the Zionist attack on Corbyn.
Israel today is rightly seen by the fascist Right as an Islamaphobic
state. Yet HnH is attempting to insert
itself into Labour’s debate on ‘anti-Semitism’ and on the wrong side. 

In his article Labour
and antisemitism: the way back from this new low Nick Lowles of Hope
not Hate comes down on the side of the Labour Right, Tom
Watson et al, who want Labour to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism which
will render all meaningful criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

Nick Lowles playing down the impact of Bannon, who is pursuing Trump’s agenda which is to enable a breakup in the European Union

The
wilful blindness of Hope not Hate’s Nick Lowles beggars belief. The main forces
behind the far-Right in the UK and Europe are also the most ardent supporters
of Israel.  Steve Bannon, the anti-Semitic
Christian
Zionist and former Trump adviser; Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi
founder of America’s alt-Right,  Geert
Wilders, the Dutch
fascist and Tommy
Robinson.

Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies addressing a Zionist rally which includes Robert de Jonge at hte front in a yellow starred t-shirt.

I
have written a number of investigatory
articles on the Zionist
supporters of Tommy Robinson. The Zionist Establishment in this country is
not prepared to disown people like Jonathan
Hoffman who keep company with Britain’s fascists and neo-Nazis. Jonathan
Arkush, the past President of the Board of Deputies who spearheaded the
campaign against Corbyn, was more than willing to address meetings that
included these fascists.

Richard
Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right describes himself as a White
Zionist for good reason. Israel is the model racial nationalist state for
Generation Identity. A state which is based on the supremacy of only the
Jewish section of its citizens. A state which is currently trying to expel
40,000 African refugees because they are the wrong colour and ethnicity, all with
the support
of the Israeli Labour Party. Israel is, as the debate over the Jewish Nation
State Law demonstrated, an apartheid society. It is a state based not merely on its Jewish citizens but Jews everywhere.
Palestinians who live in Israel have no such rights. 

What is terrible is the way the Zionist press sings in unison

In
his article Labour
and antisemitism: the way back from this new low Lowles says that the question
is not whether there is anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, but the ‘perception’
of an existentialist threat. So when the Zionist press go around stirring up
peoples’ fears, we have to treat those fears as if they have some basis in
reality?

The
fact that Corbyn has been bullied into apologising for something that doesn’t
exist proves nothing other than that you can coerce people into saying
virtually anything. The Moscow  Trials
proved that innocent people confess to things they haven’t done all the time.

Lowles support for removing veteran left winger Pete Willsman from the NEC lines him up with the Right of the Labour Party

If
the Zionist press believe that Corbyn’s long record of support for the
Palestinians constitutes an ‘existentialist
threat’ then ‘existential’ has lost all meaning. Lowles repeats the
Zionist  mantra that ‘Some people are talking about leaving the
country if Labour wins a General Election.’ This is the kind of blackmail
that was used in Nicaragua and Venezuela when people like Hugo
Chavez were elected.  In Latin
America under Reagan, many in the small and privileged Jewish communities left
and this was used by Reagan and Bush as proof of ‘anti-Semitism’ whereas if it
is proof of anything it is that the political and economic interests of many
Jews no longer coincide with the poor and oppressed. Zionism consistently encourages
Jews to go to Israel and the fake antisemitism moral panic provides an ideal
opportunity.

Gerry Gable, the arch-Zionist and Jewish racist who is editor of Searchlight

In
a racist sop to identity politics Lowles says he doesn’t feel it is his right ‘as a non-Jew to deny the right of my Jewish
friends to feel as they do.’ No one is denying anyone the right to ‘feel as they do.’ What I object to is
the smearing of people who are appalled at Israel’s human right record with the
label ‘anti-Semite.’

Ahed Tamimi, gaoled by a military court for 8 months has emerged as the Palestinians’ hero – Lowles professes himself shocked at her sentence but doesn’t ask why a 17 year old Palestinian girl is gaoled for 8 months for slapping a soldier and a soldier, Elor Azaria, who murdered a wounded Palestinian who was unconscious, is given 9 months

I
don’t of course know who Lowles pro-Jewish friends are. Clearly they aren’t
anti-Zionist Jews or even members of Jewdas. They are the same rich, privileged
White Jews who see Corbyn as a threat and are threatening to leave.

Lowles
continues the same trite point that the Freedlands of this world make, namely
that Labour ‘cannot put itself in the
position of saying that it understands antisemitism better than those who
suffer it.’ The problem is that Jews don’t ‘suffer’ anti-Semitism today. 
That is why we have a bogus campaign utilising false anti-semitism.

Racism
however isn’t a matter of perception or intuition, but a question of practice. Who is it who ‘suffers’ anti-Semitism
today? What we are really talking about is bogus, fictitious anti-Semitism!

When
Jews really did experience anti-Semitism before World War I, it was because
people like the Zionists’ friend Lord Balfour wanted to keep them out and the
British Brothers League in between attacking them complained they wouldn’t mix
with them. 

As we wrote in our letter to the Guardian, Jews today don’t
suffer from immigration controls.  There
is no Jewish Windrush.  There are no
Jewish deaths in police custody and Jews are not the subject of violence or
economic discrimination. Anti-Semitism today is a matter of prejudice not state racism. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is a phantom conjured up whenever
Israel is on the agenda and that is what the IHRA is about.

The
problem with some people who believe they are still on the Left is that they
hide their stupidity beneath what they think are profound insights.  Thus Lowles tells us that ‘For most of the last century the Labour
Party was the natural political home of British Jews.’  The person who was most knowledgeable about
the Jewish working class in the East End was the historian, William Fishman who
told how on 26 January 1894 between five and six hundred Jewish unemployed
invaded the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place, in protest at remarks on
unemployment which the Chief Rabbi had made. 
One hundred Police with truncheons drawn were called to evict them.  [East
End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, p.205]

Today
a letter
from 69 rabbis is seen as some kind of proof of anti-Semitism. When the Jewish working
class fought for better wages and conditions, the last people they turned to
were rabbis or Zionists.

When I was young, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there
were queues round the block for Blooms, the kosher restaurant in Whitechapel in
London’s East End. Today the restaurant is gone because the Jews have gone. They
have moved to Golders Green and the London suburbs. They have become wealthier
and more conservative. There are relatively few Jewish trade union activists,
certainly not in manual unions. To pretend that Labour’s position on Israel
(which is what the anti-Semitism allegations amount to) is responsible for
Jewish estrangement from Labour is either a product of ignorance, dishonesty or
both.

Thirty five years ago, in The Jewish Community in British Politics, [Clarendon Press, 1983]
Jewish Chronicle columnist and academic Dr Geoffrey Alderman demonstrated that
the Jewish community had lurched to the Right.  
Those who think we are witnessing something new should read the chapter Return to the Right. Alderman described
the by-election in Finchley North in 1978. It had a large Jewish
electorate.  Sir Keith Joseph, Thatcher’s
mentor made an openly racist appeal for Jewish support by attacking the immigration
of Black and Asian people. The Tories gained Ilford North with a swing of 6.9% ‘but among Jewish voters there the swing to
the Conservatives was a massive 11.2%.’ (p.149) In other words Jews were
even more hostile to immigration than others in the White community.

The
move of Jews to the right occurred long before Corbyn became leader of the
Labour Party. Perhaps Lowles has forgotten the attacks on Ed Milband? The Times of Israel published  Ed
Miliband has a very Jewish problem in August 2014 and 8 months later the
Spectator led with How
Ed Miliband lost the Jewish vote. We even had the Guardian’s Maureen
Lipman drops long-standing support for Labour party in October 2014, a
trick she managed to repeat recently! and YNet, the online site for Israel’s
largest paid newspaper, Yediot Aharanot led with British Jews
turn away from Ed Miliband’s Labour Party, the subheadline of which was ‘New poll also shows dramatic drop in support for Labour, after Jewish
leader’s comments on Israel, support for Palestinian statehood vote.’

All this talk of a ‘Jewish vote’ is itself anti-Semitic.  Jews don’t vote as Jews but as British
people who happen to be Jewish. Israel comes fairly low down on the list of
their concerns. In 2015 Yachad, a liberal Zionist group commissioned a survey The
Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel. 
The percentage of those identifying as Zionists (59%) had dropped 12% since
a previous study five years before.

The whole Jewish
community is barely 300,000.  It is doubtful
if more than 100,000 Jews vote.  Compared
to the number of Muslims, these numbers are trivial.  Why then the concern about the voting habits
of Jews?  Because Jews are being used by
the political establishment to justify Britain’s relationship with Israel.

Even if
every Jew in Britain based their identity around Israel, it would still not be anti-Semitic
to oppose Israel as a racist state and Zionism as a racist ideology. Criticism of
religious or philosophical beliefs are never racist unless that criticism is a
substitute for an attack on the people who hold those beliefs.

Just suppose
that a majority of British Africans supported FGM (Female Genital Mutilation)
it would not be racist to oppose FGM. Likewise criticism of the Niqab is not
anti-Islamic.  However, as Boris Johnson
showed, if you attack the people who hold such beliefs, whilst pretending that
you are only engaged in innocent banter then yes you are racist.

British Jews were moving
to the Right well before Corbyn was even in Parliament. The Jewish Labour
Movement 92-4% vote for Owen Smith two years ago speaks volumes. The JLM are
the racist representatives of the racist Israeli Labour Party. They are
affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, whose Land
Settlement Division funds and plans Jewish settlement in the West Bank,
despite the purported two state position of the JLM.

Lowles argues that Labour should adopt the
IHRA definition of anti-Semitism  because it is ‘the internationally recognised definition of antisemitism and… fully
allows criticism of the policies and actions of the Israeli government.’  This is a double lie.  The IHRA states that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country
cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.’ In other words since Israel is not like any other country
any anti-Zionist criticism is automatically rendered as potentially anti-Semitic.

The IHRA has already been used to stifle
criticism of Israel as an apartheid state. 
Hugh
Tomlinson QC and Stephen
Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge, have both warned that the
IHRA has the potential to ‘chill’ free
speech but Nick Lowles knows better.

Even the author of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, in testimony
to the House of Representatives in November 2017 warned that:

The definition was not drafted,
and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college
campus. In fact, at a conference in 2010 about the impact of the definition, I
highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.

Stern spoke
about how the IHRA was ‘was being employed in an attempt to restrict academic
freedom and punish political speech’. 
For Lowles to claim otherwise means he is either a knave or a fool, or
most likely both.

Nor
is the IHRA
‘the internationally recognised definition
of anti-Semitism’. It is in its own words a ‘working definition’, the old EUMC
Working Definition on Anti-Semitism which the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency
junked around 2011. It has been swallowed whole by the IHRA and relaunched as a
diplomatic protocol agreed between the leaders of 31 states, including the
anti-Semitic governments of Poland and Hungary. 

The
IHRA’s whole purpose is to prevent criticism of Zionism, the ideology of the
Israeli state and its racist colonial foundations. Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, of
which there are many, are perfectly valid and not in any way anti-semitic. The IHRA’s purpose is to negate all but the most anodyne criticism of Israel in particular questions such as why it behaves as it does.. 

Lowles
calls for the dropping of disciplinary action against the Margaret Hodge whilst
referring to Ken Livingstone’s ‘repeated
anti-Jewish slurs’. No examples to back up this lie are given.

Searchlight’s Zionism and racism led to a major estrangement between the magazine and many of its ethnic minority readers

Hope
not Hate was formed in 2004. In 2011 it split from Searchlight anti-fascist magazine in an unseemly battle about money
and resources. Despite this some of us had high hopes that the Searchlight era
of duplicity and trading information with the secret state were over.  Over the years Searchlight had become more
and more distrusted by anti-fascists because of the way its editor Gerry Gable
operated. See The
Death Agony of Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine

Maurice Ludmer – the founding editor of Searchlight

Searchlight
was founded by Maurice Ludmer in February 1975. 
Ludmer came from the labour movement and was President of Birmingham
Trades Council.  His anti-fascist work was
part of his anti-racist work with people like the Indian Workers Association. 
He was first and foremost a socialist and a communist unlike his
successors Gerry Gable and Nick Lowles. Unfortunately Gable and Lowles forgot
what Ludmer had once
said:

‘‘If every
organisation in Britain that can be defined as fascist were to go out of
existence tomorrow, we would still have a profound and deep-rooted problem of
racism in our society.  The truth of the matter is that there is no need
to import racist ideas via pro-Nazi organisations; racialism in Britain is
based on our own history of 350 years of colonialism.  National Front
activists have not introduced racialism but rather used and exploited what
already exists in abundance.’

Mark Hosenball, American journalist who was deported  from Britain for exposing GCHQ – Gable did his best to undermine support for the campaign

Ludmer’s successor Gerry Gable saw Searchlight as a bourgeois
anti-fascist journal which obtained information on fascists through trading
information about the left with the secret state (MI5/SB) and Israeli
intelligence.  One such example was the Gable Memorandum
sent to his boss Barry Cox at London Weekend Television in which
Gable tried to discredit Mark Hosenball, a journalist, and Phil Agee, a former
CIA agent. The Labour Government at the time, under Home Secretary Merlyn Rees were
trying to deport Agee and Hosenball. In the memo Gable refers to his
Intelligence sources as ‘Left Watchers’ by
which he means MI5. He is clearly trying to lobby LWT not to treat the trial
known then as the ABC trial sympathetically. In other words Gable was acting as
an MI5 agent. He wrote:

Phil Agee – CIA Caseworker who exposed the role that the CIA played in South American countries

The arrest of Campbell/Berry and
Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security
service sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence that for about four
years Campbell, Berry and Kelly and others have been systematically gathering
top level security material. Campbell, who claims to have only an interest in technological
matters in as far as the state is involved, had done four years detailed research
into the whole structure of the other side of not only our Intelligence services
but those of other NATO countries.

Searchlight
since the death of Maurice
Ludmer has been openly Zionist. Not only was Searchlight trading
information with MI5/Special Branch but it was actively trying to split and
destabilise the anti-fascist movement. 
At the 1985 Conference of Anti-Fascist Action in Birmingham the main
debate occurred over allegations by Searchlight that the Class War Anarchist
group were in an alliance with the National Front and fascists. There was no proof
that this was true and none was ever forthcoming but coming from what had, until
then, been a well respected anti-fascist journal, respected because of the work
of Ludmer, the allegations had to be treated seriously. 

At
this conference, at which I was elected onto the Executive of AFA, a decision
was narrowly taken to suspend  Class War
from membership of AFA until an Inquiry looked into the allegations.  Amazingly Searchlight was unable to supply any
evidence whatsoever to back up its allegations. A fellow member of AFA’s
Executive, Unmesh Desai (now a right-wing councillor on the Greater London
Authority) confirmed this to me.  As the AFA
Report into Searchlight Allegations Against Class War concluded:

‘Despite the leading role of SEARCHLIGHT
Magazine in the affair, and despite many approaches to the magazine for
evidence, the sum total of material from Searchlight was nil. We are bemused by
Searchlight’s role in this affair.’  

Smeeth is one of the most detestable of Labour MPs, quite an achievement in a group which has its fair share of villains

See
also my own article for the Newsletter of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Undermining Anti-Fascists, Defending Zionism.
Despite the appointment of Ruth Smeeth as Deputy Director in 2010, she later became a right-wing
Zionist Labour MP in 2015, we had high hopes that HnH would not follow the
Searchlight path. It produced the very useful Counter-Jihad
Report. In an article Hope
Not Hate refuses to be bullied, which was an article criticising Gilad
Atzmon, the anti-Semitic jazz musician, Lowles rebutted claims that his attack
on Atzmon, an ex-Israeli jazz musician who portrayed himself as a Palestinian
supporter were motivated by wider sympathies for Israel:

Let’s put aside the
Israel/Palestine question (after all I have never once vocalised my opinion on
this subject though my detractors are quick to accuse me of being part of a
co-ordinated Zionist conspiracy) and let’s look at what Gilad Atzmon actually
says

It is extremely
unfortunate that HnH and Nick Lowles have gone back on this promise and followed
Searchlight down the road to a reactionary ‘anti-fascism’ which ends up
supporting the very system that produces fascism. HnH’s attacks
on Jackie Walker have been equally as disgusting.

We can only suggest that
Nick Lowles and his followers take to heart the advice of Maurice Ludmer above.

Tony Greenstein