IT is beyond question that the anti-Semitism controversy that erupted in Britain last week has damaged that nation’s Labour Party. It is equally true that some of the most unconstructive interventions in the ensuing debate have come from within the party, mainly, albeit not exclusively, from those determined to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
The latest fracas, which fits a pattern that has been delineated over an extended period, was sparked by a right-wing blogger’s ‘revelation’ about a Facebook post from nearly two years ago from Naz Shah, an MP who also happened to be shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s parliamentary private secretary.
She was more or less immediately suspended from the party, and has apologised profusely and abjectly for her indiscretion. Her ‘crime’, dating back to the Israeli state’s most recent military assault against Gaza and before Shah was an MP, involved reposting a graphic depicting Israel relocated to the centre of the United States, with a few lines of commentary on why this would be an ideal “solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict”.
The British Labour Party’s defensive posture is not surprising.
It’s obviously satire, but is it anti-Semitic? Well, it appears to have originated on the blog of American academic and writer Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors and a trenchant critic of Israeli policies as well as what he has termed “the Holocaust industry”, but decidedly not someone who advocates the destruction of Israel.
Then, former London mayor and Labour MP Ken Livingstone stepped into the row, arguing in a BBC interview that Shah’s “remarks were over the top but she is not anti-Semitic”, before adding: “Let’s remember when [Adolf] Hitler won his election in 1932 [sic], his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism … before he went mad and killed six million Jews.”
Livingstone, who was also promptly suspended from the Labour Party, appears to subsequently have realised that his reference to Hitler was both unhelpful and unnecessary, but has refused to issue an apology or retract his statement, on the grounds that it was accurate. In his defence he even cited a comment last year by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the effect that Hitler was determined to expel rather than slaughter Jews until convinced otherwise by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.
In the face of an uproar, not least within Israel, Netanyahu was obliged to withdraw the insinuation that the Holocaust was essentially a Palestinian plot. The fact remains, though, that segments of the Zionist movement initially collaborated with the Nazi authorities in sending some 20,000 German Jews to Palestine, and even subsequently the Third Reich contemplated the involuntary deportation of Jews to, notably, Madagascar. It didn’t, though, with horrendous consequences that no one can seriously deny or overlook.
Livingstone’s claim that Hitler or his regime ‘supported’ Zionism is open to argument, but he clearly did not call Hitler a Zionist, as any number of detractors and media outlets continue to claim. The accusation of being a “Nazi apologist”, aggressively levelled against him outside the BBC studios by Labour MP John Mann, is both malicious and patently absurd.
Uncritical admirers of Israel — and both sides of politics boast a fair number in most Western countries — have long adopted the strategy of damning critics of the Jewish state’s policies and practices as anti-Semite. Some even claim that anti-Zionism is essentially anti-Semitic. That’s a ridiculous claim, not least because there are any number of anti-Zionist Jews, not least in the context of Israel’s expansionist aims vis-à-vis the occupied territories.
In fact, most critiques of Israel over recent years relate specifically to the uncompromising policies of the Likud party and its allies. Perhaps it’s worth noting that when Menachem Begin, eventually the first Likudite prime minister of Israel and a veteran of the terrorist Irgun organisation, first visited the US to garner support for his new Herut party (a precursor of Likud), Jewish intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein warned Americans against backing “this latest manifestation of fascism”.
A similar warning about present-day Likud anywhere in the West would instantly be castigated as racist. The defensive posture of the British Labour Party’s leadership in the context of the latest controversy is disconcerting, but perhaps not surprising. Implacably hostile media coverage is likely to contribute to a poor showing in tomorrow’s local council and Scottish elections — and London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, himself the victim of race-baiting by the campaign of his Tory opponent Zac Goldsmith, has been vociferous in his condemnations of Livingstone to a stupid extent.
The party has instituted an inquiry into racism within its ranks, which is all very well provided it does not feed into what already appears to be a witch-hunt against Labour’s more progressive elements, aimed ultimately at destroying Corbyn’s leadership and restoring the party’s Blairite neoliberal credentials.
Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2016
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