Weaponising Anti-Semitism by Asa Winstanley

Author:Asa Winstanley
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL000000
ISBN: 9781682193822
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2023-05-18T10:00:00+00:00

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The immense amount of material support that the German government under the Nazis gave to the Zionist movement is plain from the historical record. The general outline of the facts laid out by Nicosia had already been published two years earlier in another book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, by Jewish American author Lenni Brenner. Addressing the Labour Party’s disciplinary panel, Ken Livingstone cited the latter. But even the mere fact of his reliance on a book by an anti-Zionist author for his defence got him into trouble. The Telegraph’s former editor Charles Moore raged that the former mayor’s use of the Brenner book proved that Labour had “embraced an ideology that has race hate at its heart.”63 The Guardian’s approach was to red-bait, stating in its headline that Livingstone had cited a “Marxist book” in defence of his comments. The reporter went on, bizarrely, to quote a history professor who admitted to not having read the book.64 Despite a raft of “Why Ken’s comments on Zionism were wrong” –style articles, no-one in the mainstream seriously addressed the historical record of Nazi support for the German Zionist movement in the 1930s.

As the “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” grew, the relevance of this largely forgotten history came to have a modern-day prominence. As decried by Labour Friends of Israel, it became a crime in the party punishable by expulsion, suspension, or censure to make “Nazi comparisons.”65 The most prominent example of this was the renowned Israeli anti-Zionist Moshé Machover, who was expelled from Labour in 2017. In a long article written for a communist newspaper, Machover had analysed the growing party witch hunt in the context of wider Zionist efforts to paint anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic. He argued that Livingstone’s point about Zionism and the Nazis the previous year had been “basically correct.” He wrote that Labour’s witch hunt should be defeated with a full-frontal political counterattack. His words now seem grimly prophetic: “It is correct to expose Zionism as a movement based on both colonisation and collusion with anti-Semitism. Don’t apologise for saying this. If you throw the sharks bloodied meat, they will only come back for more. At the moment the left is apologising too much, in the hope that the right will let up. They never will.”66 If the party leadership had taken these words to heart things could have turned out differently.

Machover’s article was reprinted by a small left-wing group, Labour Party Marxists, who put it on the front page of a special newsletter they distributed outside Labour conference in September 2017. The headline read: “Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism,” above a photo of Jeremy Corbyn speaking to a Palestine solidarity rally. Although the group had only a handful of members, they reported that their publication was eagerly snapped up by the Brighton delegates. The membership was, as polling evidence showed, overwhelmingly sceptical of “Labour anti-Semitism” claims. At conference that year, powerful pro-Corbyn union leader Len McCluskey (the general secretary of Britain’s largest trade union, Unite)

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