I’d like to make a few points – mostly but not exclusively pessimistic – about the Left and anti-semitism; five of them, in fact. (This piece responds to Richard Seymour’s excellent piece on the subject, which you should read first. This one’s better, though – two more points!)
Here they are. (Update 25th April: links added to later posts in the series.)
- Everyone knows this is ridiculous
- It’s taken on a life of its own
- Jews are different
- The question of Palestine
- The socialism of fools
Go.
- Everyone knows this is ridiculous
I’ve been active on the left, off and on (more off than on, if I’m honest) since the late 1980s. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging around with people on the Campaign Group area of the Labour left, and with the kind of Trots who were open-minded and smart enough to want to work with Labour people; nationalists, greens and anarchists, ditto. I haven’t had much to do with Communists of any variety, or with anyone to the Right of Robin Cook, say. But as for the Labour Left and the left-of-Labour Left – the scene that Jeremy Corbyn comes from – I’ve seen a bit of it.
Have I seen anyone excluded from a position, or lobbied against, or badmouthed in any way, because they were Jewish? No. Not ever; not once.
Have I worked with people – have people I trust and admire worked with people – who I knew to be Jewish, without their Jewishness ever being an issue? Dude, please. Have some of the people I trust and admire been Jewish themselves? Yes, of course. (And no, I don’t just mean Karl Marx.)
So: is the Left – specifically, the Left that Jeremy Corbyn came from and represents – a haven for antisemites? Apparently not. Do antisemitic attitudes go unchallenged? Only in the sense that there’s no need to challenge them, because they’re not there in the first place. At least, that’s my experience.
This is, apart from anything else, a peculiar situation: when we can seriously discuss the possibility that antisemitism is rife in the Labour Party, without anyone (on either side) feeling that whether or not Jewish party members are being discriminated against is a relevant consideration. To put it another way, it’s not the Left that portrayed Jon Lansman as a ‘puppeteer’ – it’s the Left that put him in his position of trust and authority.
Update 30/3/18 This point has been echoed from an unexpected quarter: the Jewish Labour Movement. Its two vice-chairs write:
Both of us have been involved in Labour Party, at the grassroots, in local government and as candidates for many years. As Labour’s Parliamentary candidate for Finchley and Golders Green at the last election and its GLA candidate in the upcoming London elections, respectively, neither of us has ever experienced any incidence of anti-Semitism from within the party.
Overall, though, this is – unfortunately – a pessimistic point. It’s clear that there is something wrong out there – something that needs to be rooted out, or swept out with an iron broom if you prefer. The fact that everyone knows it’s ridiculous to accuse Corbyn – or the Left in general – of antisemitism on a personal level doesn’t make the problem go away; it just makes it harder to deal with. This is partly because of the temptation of outright denial on the Left, but also partly because of the urge to double down on the Right. If you know deep down that your charge isn’t exactly, precisely true, the temptation will be to scrape around all the harder for almost-evidence to prove it almost true.
Which brings us to
- It’s taken on a life of its own
I like to Google, as Marc Bolan never said; when I see it alleged that X repeated the blood libel or Y denied the Holocaust, I like to find an earlier and closer source to check out what the person actually said. (I look for song lyrics sometimes, too.) I also follow a number of people I mostly disagree with on Twitter, for reasons that needn’t detain us now. Put the two together and I’m really quite staggeringly well-informed, for a sense of the word ‘well-informed’ that includes ‘confused and baffled’. Just today I’ve seen Alan Bull’s explanation for re-posting Holocaust denial (apparently he made it quite clear that he didn’t agree with it, in a comment, when he was challenged); I’ve also seen a call for Haringey Labour Party to be suspended – not for antisemitism or for condoning antisemitism, but for passing a motion saying that antisemitism was no more common in the Labour Party than anywhere else. (This was the position of the Community Security Trust just last year (PDF), but I guess we’ve moved on.)
On one hand, there are those who say that Bull should be allowed to run for his local council – and that attempts to deny the Holocaust are interesting and worth discussing on their merits; on the other, there are those who say that Christine Shawcroft should be suspended from the party forthwith, for objecting to Bull’s suspension before she’d even seen the material he posted. It’s not that there’s no middle ground between the two; on the face of it there’s plenty. It’s more that nobody seems interested in occupying it. Battle has been joined, and “where were you when A failed to condemn B for refusing to dissociate from C?” is the order of the day. And the kind of principled left position that appears to be called for – something on the lines of “Alan Bull’s out of here, Tony Greenstein needs to shut up and keep his head down, and now shall we get back to the local elections?” – isn’t really being called for at all; any pronouncement along those lines would be met with cries of “too little, too late” and assorted what-about-ery. Second pessimistic point: this is going to run and run.
The next one is more difficult, so let’s take a break. Part 2 tomorrow, hopefully.
Workers’ Playtime 