On supporting Palestine

This is one of those times when lots of people are talking about Israel and Palestine, and expressing their support for Palestinians. I want people to speak out against bombings, against ethnic cleansing, against the removal of families from homes in which they have lived for more than 50 years. I do not want there to be any state in the world which excludes people from citizenship along ethnic lines. Still less do I want there to be a state which dispossesses people while claiming to speak for the world’s Jews. But, for the Palestinians to win, they will need to have the backing of huge numbers of people. That means that for everyone giving their support to Palestine, it matters how we talk.

It is possible – in fact it’s quite easy – to express support for Palestinians in ways which are pointlessly grating to ordinary Jewish people, whether or not those words are antisemitic.*

Here are some tips of my own to help people in the UK to get it right, by helping a righteous cause without being idiots:

1. (The easy bit). Just don’t say things which are plainly and clearly antisemitic. Eg one socialist group I’m in last week included a comment asking where a Jewish person who supports Israel’s gets her money from. Which plays old fantasies that all Jews either have money or conspire together and can call on people who do.

2. Don’t blame British Jews for the actions of the state of Israel. This is why the racist cavalcade was so incredibly stupid: the people driving the cars went to a perceived Jewish area in order to upset British Jews. Such behaviour isn’t just offensive it’s also counterproductive – it turns people against the majority of folks who supporting Palestinian rights and aren’t idiots.

3. Don’t demand that British Jews take a stance. If you find someone disagrees with you, don’t ask “Are you Jewish?” If you put something on your facebook wall and people say they don’t like it, don’t say “the Jews are disagreeing with me”.

4. Criticise Israel – Israeli tanks, Israeli ministers, Israeli actions – try not to say “Zionists” as a shorthand not “the Zionists” unless you’ve thought carefully about the point you’re making, and you’re being really, *really* precise.

5. Don’t post anything in haste or in anger. If someone annoys you, put a timer on your phone and just don’t say anything for 10 minutes. There is a real chance that what they’ve said is badly written or even wholly inoffensive, and that your response will significantly increase the tension in the room.

6. Try hard to avoid analogies with the 1930s. You might think you’ve come across a brilliant, one-liner which explains it more than anything. But all that will happen is that someone else reading your post will think – me, you’re call me a Nazi, me?

7. Don’t blame “religion”.

8. Don’t assume. The world is full of antizionist Jews; it is full of zionist Jews, and (shocking as it may seem) people who just want to be left along and get on with their life and that matters a lot more to them than your guesses about what they did/do/should think.

9. Listen to people you disagree with. This is one of the issues that involves people – and a lot of them – which means almost everyone will know at least one thing you don’t. If only you give them a chance to speak you. If you let them tell you someone you didn’t know, you will be a better activist for it.

10. Don’t be afraid to apologise.

Oh, and last of all, don’t be afraid to call *me* out. Quite a lot of these things are things that I see because *I’ve* done them wrong – and I’m not proud of them. I’m posting this as much for me as anyone else. If I’ve got things wrong, show me, and I’ll apologise and I’ll do my hardest to get it right next time.

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*(It’s also just about possible to be grating on social media and to be effective, but the group of people who are sharp enough to do this are vanishingly small – it’s more or less just Jewdas – and they’ve been thinking about the cultural politics of this for years).

The Labour Party and Anti-Semitism

With two weeks to go to the General Election, the press has resumed its focus on the character of the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, and his suitability to be Prime Minister. Key to this is an allegation that the party is institutionally anti-semitic in that a) a significant proportion of its members are anti-semites, and b) the present Labour Party leadership, on receiving complaints repeatedly frustrates them, with the purpose of keeping people in membership who should be excluded.

People have tried to engage with these allegations, particularly the first one, “sociologically”, i.e. by asking how many complaints there have been, whether there have or should have been a similar volume of complaints in the Conservative Party, etc. These approaches don’t however persuade anyone other than the already persuaded. They feel like a form of “defender’s” reasoning, i.e. that if it was possible to prove that only 1% of the members of the Labour Party were anti-Semites (or 0.1% or 0.0001%) then this would “prove” that the party was above criticism. They are usually backed up by a statement along the lines of “but any anti-semitism would be too much”. If that sentence is to have any meaning – and the intention is to cut out all racism including anti-Jewish racism from all politics – then the sociological explanation can’t wash. Because it concedes into the indefinite future the continuing presence of anti-Jewish racism, and sounds suspiciously like an argument for leaving it in place.

What I want to do here is first of all remind people of the history of membership complaints in the Labour Party, and then write about the complaints individually using case-studies, before coming back in at the end to making some brief comments about the prevalence within the Labour Party of each of the types of behavior to which those particular complaints relate. Be wanted this is long (c1800 words): but the issue requires a certain detail.

When Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, he was seen to be taking the party into political positions (eg pacifism, social redistribution) which the party had not held for many years. Labour also had a leadership election system in which it was very easy to join, and hundreds of thousands of people did. Therefore the press ran a large number of stories to the effect that Labour was being taken over by a new kind of ultra-leftwing person. MPs, leaders of Constituency Labour Parties, etc – responded by trying to exclude some off the new members on factional lines. At this stage, ie 2015-6, none of the story was about anti-semitism, but what did happen was that the party set in train tens of thousands of investigations. The most common basis of investigation was that people had expressed on social media a support for a Green or non-Labour left candidate in a previous election. When the complaints of anti-semitism began in any serious number, which was later, this experience was disastrous: it left a legacy in which complaints were over-politicised, and frequently spurious, and a delayed outcome to an investigation was seen as a desirable outcome – since it favoured the then status quo (i.e. excluding potential Corbyn voters).

When complaints of anti-semitism began, they were made in large number. The best-known example is one single MP on the right of the party Margaret Hodge who made two hundred complaints, all of which therefore had to be investigated. Only 20 of her complaints were about members of the Labour Party, and that party on learning that someone was not a member generally stopped investigating at that point. But, on the other hand, it could not stop investigating until someone’s membership status had been confirmed. Delays at this stage contributed to a sense that Labour had something to hide. But we need to be clear: the people who were responsible for the delays were Corbyn’s critics and not the present leadership: the people responsible for investigating complaints were the same as in 2015-6, and they brought to the complaints the old lethargy. Further the people making the complaints prioritised volume, with 673 complaints made between April 2018 and February 2019,a number which was then duly leaked to the press. The result was that investigators had to wade through hundreds of complaints in order to find a relatively small number that might possibly lead to sanction.

The best way to understand the approach of the Labour Party and its present leadership to the complaints is by looking at three typical subjects of complaints.

EXPULSION INEVITABLE
There exists a class of people who have been members of the Labour Party and who have shared clearly racist messages, either with a historic focus (i.e. claims that the Holocaust did not happen or that the numbers were exaggerated) or a present-day one (i.e. claims that British or European politics is secretly dominated by a cabal of Jews). So in August 2019, the recently retired former chair of South Dorset Labour Party Mollie Collins was found to have shared on social media, in 2016, a link to a website saying, “Rothschilds bankers did 9/11 not Muslims”. At the time of writing, Ms Collins has on her facebook page, a message insisting on her innocence, claiming that she had been targeted by “fifth columnists” defending her “favourite politician” Ken Livingstone, and claiming to have been the victim of a “truly Inquisition style process with not the slightest chance of justice for those falsely accused.” Ms Collins was expelled, and rightly so.

THE DIFFICULT CASES
There have also been harder cases eg where the person accused of anti-semitism is Jewish, or where they have a very long history of building the Labour Party, and promoting left-wing values, so that for example the case for a sanction is clear, but the nature of the sanction requires some thought. Take for example, Jackie Walker, who had been a member of the Labour Party for decades, and who was accused amongst other things of having written on social media that Jews were “chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade”. The comments were untrue, they played into racist stereotypes, and they were likely to cause offence. But in any rational investigation system, you do not simply ask what happened (i.e. what the behavior was) you also ask what kind of punishment it should merit.

For Jackie Walker’s defenders, it was significant that she is Jewish. This is in fact a striking feature of the Labour Party complaints in general – many of the accusers are Jewish (quite a number are non-Jewish people presenting themselves as defenders of Jews) – but also many of the accused are Jewish, typically anti-zionist Jews who have long campaigned against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinans. Jews in the latter position are both repeatedly accused of anti-semtism and repeatedly its victims.

It is entirely plausible that such people could be trapped into anti-semitic modes of thinking. Non-Jews rarely understand this, but in fact anti-semitism has all the inward-facing element of every other prejudice. Think of women who pass on sexist values to their daughters. Think of LGBT people who internalise homophobia and repeat it privately in LGBT circles – these things happen – and it is exactly the same with anti-semitism. Being told that the world is secretly run by a nearly-cabal of invisible, hostile people, you can start internalising that logic, and using it when you are criticised.

But conversely, anti-Zionist Jews are also repeatedly the victims of anti-semitic abuse from other Jews. They are told that they are “kapos” i.e. like the Jewish people who were employed in the camps in in-between roles, between the guards and the prisoners. This is the equivalent in Jewish circles of when black people are accused of being “coconuts” (i.e. white on the inside) – it is every bit as unpleasant, because it says to the victims that they are not really Jewish, and if anything it has more specific and nastier historical connotations.

This certainly was the case with Jackie Walker who received a large quantity of abuse, some of it directed against her as Jew and some as a black woman.

The point of any disciplinary process, of any type, is not to punish people but to prevent behavior. In a less-charged atmosphere, any objective investigator would have asked whether her expulsion was appropriate. If her crime was to say that Jews were the perpetrators of the slave trade, then was she willing to acknowledge that this was a myth? To withdraw the statement and to apologise for it? To read, and understand the origins of that statement in a particular kind of right-wing and racist argument (albeit – another complexity – an argument of black nationalist origin)?

In the actual atmosphere of the last two years, with numerous people lobbying for Jackie Walker’s expulsion, she was indeed expelled (albeit for breach of party rules rather than anti-semitism). The Labour Party leadership did what its critics asked it to do.

COMPLAINT UNWARRANTED
Another typical case is that of Wirral councilor (and another Jewish woman) Jo Bird who argued at a public meeting for a rigorous system of investigating complaints of anti-semitism. In a flat-footed attempted at humour, she called this “Jew process”. She was suspended for 9 days and reinstated. Anti-Corbyn newspapers used her story as further proof the institutional racism of the Labour Party but bluntly it was nothing of that sort. Ms Bird wasn’t Mel Brooks, she neither enjoyed his genius for comic timing nor (this is the Labour Party) his capacity for bad taste. Above all, she lacked his audience: a generation of people willing to mock their own fears.

In conclusion: do the above case histories prove that Labour is institutionally racist, that its leaders have been sabotaging complaints, making life easy for their friends, etc?

Of the 673 complaints made to the Labour Party up to February 2019, 12 led to expulsions. IE twelve were of the “Mollie Collins” or the “Jackie Walker” sort. The others were of the “Jo Bird” sort – either in that they were not so serious that they justified punishment, or that the person making a serious comment was not a member of the Labour Party and there was nothing Labour could do.

Not one of the 661 complaints which led to no sanction or to a lesser punishment has resulted, as far as I can tell, in a further complaint that the person should actually have been expelled.

I will leave leaders to conclude for themselves whether this is such a pattern of behavior that support for the present leadership of the Labour Party is, as has been argued this week, “incompatible with the British values of which we are so proud – of dignity and respect for all people”.

On being principled when the world falls in

Some tips for people who want to get through a shitstorm with their dignity intact

Don’t post Chomsky. Really *don’t*. If you don’t know why he’s a tainted source try googling Chomsky / Faurisson

Don’t post articles telling me that x percent of British people think Jews are great. Donald Trump is an anti-Semite who thinks Jews are great.

Stop make excuses for people recirculating racist myths; the slave trade was run by Jews? No, it wasn’t.

Stop pretending that the left / Labour / Corbyn has simply not put one foot wrong on this issue in five years. This is our scandal. Start owning it.

Stop being so defensive. We’re living in the biggest upturn in global antisemitism in decades. Of course a left which is being deliberately, and rightly, populist is vulnerable to far-right ideas finding a home in it.

Do *not* stop talking about Palestine.

Learn from the younger generation of British Jews in their 20s (ie much younger than me) who have not invested their whole lives in Labour or the left and are willing to admit when something’s in front of their face

Learn from the things that previous generations got wrong. There were nationalists among the Spanish anarchists, antisemites in the KPD, “left-wing” arguments for the anti-Dreyfusards. We remember these as minorities because people were principled, argued with antisemites, defeated them

Do not think because your mate is Jewish and leftwing they are incapable of getting this issue wrong. All oppressed groups have moments of doubt, moments when we hear the nonsense outside and internalise it and use it against ourselves

Admit it, confront it, defeat it. That’s our only hope.

Why I can’t stand philo-semites.

Because they don’t understand the first things about Jewish history. This isn’t about Cable Street. This is about the subtle legacy of Judaism, and the tradition it leaves even as a group of people are secularised. They don’t understand that long before the Jews had a relationship with the left. Jews *were* the left: the anarchists in the East End with their visions of the end times that had already come, the socialists at meetings of the SDF, talking after the speaker ended and sighing about Hyndman, and saying, We are going to have do something about him, aren’t we? And not wanting to have to act but knowing that they should.

Because they don’t understand that this history isn’t finished, you can see it in the synagogues where even now people collect for refugees. You can see it in the left, in the people, In the groups.

Because they don’t feel doubt.

Because they don’t understand Israel. They don’t grasp that even among many centre-right Jews, there is a disquiet about Israel’s crimes: the corruption, the narrowing of the country’s politics, the killings of Palestinians. When even the Union of Jewish Students is running a petition, right now, about the country’s racist treatment of Africans, you know that the discontent among British Jews is far, far higher than it is among the philo-semites for whom every atrocity has to be put in quotation marks.

Because they think that by caring really hard about anti-semitism they are entitled to feel its pain, when they don’t understand for a second how the trauma stuck around, how many even in the second generation it broke.

Because they never, ever, tell jokes.

Because at the end of their politics are silences. The Jews in France right now, who are going on demonstrations, attacking the left and applauding Marine Le Pen: they are made to vanish. Trump’s anti-Semitism, the attacks on Jewish cemeteries which he blamed on Jews: none of this happened.

Because they guard the flank to their left and they keep the flank to their right unguarded.

And because the monsters we are going to have to face will not wear the uniforms of the past. But they are coming closer.

(first published on facebook).

The friends I want to have, and the friends I don’t

For people who read this site and have never met me, I thought it might be useful to try to explain some things about me you probably don’t know.

1. I’m Jewish (it’s weird having to be explain this stuff right now, but wait with me while and you’ll understand).

2. I’m not “really” Jewish. By that, I mean that I don’t conform to most people’s idea of what a Jew is. I don’t dress like a Jew, whatever that would mean, and Woody Allen’s not my thing. I only have one Jewish parent. And they were born in 1946. Like a lot of Jewish people in that era – and unlike their counterparts born 20 or 40 years later – that means we didn’t practice any religion at home and I’ve never been in a synagogue.

3. There’s another way that I’m really, really unlike most British Jews: in that my parents were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Oddly enough, in some ways that’s possibly the most unusual thing about my Jewishness. Many British Jews are second-, third-, fourth-generation British. That means that their immediate family weren’t caught in Eastern Europe. Sure, in the small parts of Britain which Hitler invaded people were taken away and killed, but we’re talking hundreds of people that’s all. (And of course there were many people from Britain who were on holiday, staying with family etc, and were caught up in events they could barely understand). I’m here because as well as being a Jew I’m also a second-generation immigrant.

4. One way my experience is unusual is that, actually, few people survived the Holocaust. Of people who lived in Germany, Austria, Poland, etc – the numbers who got out are small, and the closer that people came to danger the fewer of them there were that escaped. If you don’t know this stuff, read Primo Levi, one of the very few Auschwitz survivors. It will give you a sense of how it was.

5. When I say that my grand-parents were Holocaust survivors, and I compare them to how Holocaust survivors are supposed to be, they were in some ways like and in some ways unlike Holocaust survivors. First, although the large majority of their relatives were killed, they were never that close to dying. They got out, from Austria, in late 1938, leaving behind parents (on both sides) and a sibling. But they in the younger generation were fine.

6. Where my grandparents get more typical is that, having escaped from Austria they (and the generation below) went through something like 40 years of emotional harm. This isn’t something I’m capable of writing about, not directly, but I’m talking the whole range of harm – suicides, mental health diagnoses that struck around for more than a decade, and a whole sense of self-hatred, desire to emulate the powerful, the oppressive, etc etc etc. That’s the thing about harm, it’s sticks around.

7. It’s the “gluey” character of suffering which explains why I am an anti-Zionist. Because if “we” have been suffering for forty years as a result of the harm that the Nazi inflicted, the dispossession, the being forced into camps, exile, the killings … it should be obvious to everyone that “they” (the people who have been disposed since 1945) are going through exactly the same process. And it takes a particular kind of cruelty-mixed-with-stupidity to say that “because the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jews”… “we” … are allowed to dispossess and harm someone else, the Palestinians.

8. I appreciate that my family’s proximity to genocide ought to make me exactly the sort of person that Zionism is supposed to be about. And yet the Zionists – especially the non-Jewish supporters of Zionism – are exactly the friends I don’t want. If someone is the ideological or actual descendant of the people who were blithe to the rise of fascism in Britain, then I don’t want them to tell me that they are on my side now. That goes for the Mail (which didn’t just run one pro-BUF headline but for several months operated as effectively the fascist party’s private press), the Royals with their several fascist salutes, the Tory Party which saw Mussolini and Hitler as people they could do business with. Even the Big Daddy of British conservatism Winston Churchill whose Zionism waxed and waned in direct proportion to his anti-semitism (if you don’t know this stuff, google him). I’m also not so keen on the sudden declarations of friendship which British Jews are getting from the likes of the Labour Right (one of whose MPs was detained in the war as a pro-fascist) and which spent the 1930s very happily demanding the outlawing and imprisonment of the relatively few people in British society who were trying to stop the fascists, mainly who were found (but not only) on the far left.

9. I’m also not keen on the sudden support I seem to be getting from all sorts of self-declared philo-Semites, the Hitchenses, the Burchills, whose support seems to be wholly dependent on the positions on they have already committed to in support of Israel and Israel’s global allies. They have a construct of what Jews are like and it’s not pretty.

10. Finally, while I’m not throwing anyone out: please think this through. I am in a Jewish family and all through my life I have spent time among other Jews. Some agree with me 100%, some 0%, and most, as you’d expect, fall somewhere in between. I argue with them. Sometimes, it’s my friends who are the ones doing the arguing and I’m left bolstering them when they’re doing ok.

But, telling me – repeatedly – that it’s not anti-Semitic to mix up Hitler and Zionists, it’s not anti-Semitic to suggest that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Hitler hadn’t suddenly turned racist (to everyone’s surprise) in 1932 (why 1932?) … you’re just making it harder for me, and for people like me. Please stop now. Its because I want to be able to agree with you – and because I want to be able to argue with the people I dislike – that you, right now, need to raise your game. Thanks.

Originally posted here.