{"id":2042,"date":"2016-05-03T22:06:52","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T20:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2042"},"modified":"2016-05-04T10:07:42","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T08:07:42","slug":"the-true-anti-semites-past-and-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-05-03\/the-true-anti-semites-past-and-present\/","title":{"rendered":"The true anti-semites, past and present"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are desperately in need of some sanity as the British political and media establishment seek to generate yet another \u201cnew anti-semitism\u201d crisis, on this occasion to undermine a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party before the upcoming local elections.<\/p>\n

Corbyn and his supporters want to revive Labour as a party of social justice, while\u00a0Britain\u2019s elites hope that \u2013 in a period of unpopular austerity \u2013 they can turn the Labour leadership\u2019s support for the Palestinians into its Achilles\u2019 heel. This is nothing more than a class war to pave the way for a return of the Blairites to lead Labour.<\/p>\n

Israel and its supporters in the UK are only too willing to help fuel the hysteria, given their own fears that a Corbyn-led government would\u00a0be bad news for an Israel committed to destroying any hope of justice for the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

I have analysed\u00a0earlier efforts to foment panic about a \u201cnew anti-semitism\u201d, including during the early years of the second intifada, when Israel\u2019s popularity plummeted. As\u00a0now, Israel tried to deflect attention from its increasingly clear abuses of Palestinians \u2013 and its lack of interest in peace-making \u2013 by suggesting that the problem lay with critics rather than its policies. You can see my articles about this here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then, the chief targets of the \u201cnew anti-semitism\u201d smear were\u00a0supposedly leftist elements in civil society and the media who were concealing their true goal \u2013 vilification of Jews \u2013 behind\u00a0criticism of Israel. The campaign, despite being patent nonsense, was successful enough that it cowed the few newly emerging critical voices in the media \u2013 and terrorised senior editors at the BBC into supine compliance with Israel\u2019s narrative.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we should take this current campaign seriously and worry that Corbyn, who is already on the back foot, is in real danger of conferring credibility on\u00a0this whole confected narrative of an \u201canti-semitism problem\u201d in Labour simply by giving it house room. The only\u00a0suitable\u00a0response is derision. Instead Corbyn has suspended leading members\u00a0of his\u00a0party and has announced an inquiry.<\/p>\n

We should be particularly wary of the wolves in sheep\u2019s clothing. The Guardian’s Jerusalem bureau chief\u00a0Peter Beaumont, for example, was set the task<\/a> of bolstering absurd claims against Ken Livingstone for being an anti-semite after he stated\u00a0\u2013 admittedly\u00a0clumsily \u2013 a historical truth\u00a0that\u00a0for a period of time Hitler\u00a0and the Zionist movement shared\u00a0enough common ground that\u00a0they held negotiations about transferring Jews to Palestine.<\/p>\n

Livingstone said the following on radio:<\/p>\n

When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a lot of information about this out there \u2013 Lenni Brenner even wrote a book on the subject. Livingstone’s mistake was both to express himself slackly\u00a0in the heat of the moment and to refer to a history that was supposed to have been disappeared down the memory hole. But what he is saying is, in essence, true.<\/p>\n

He could have gone further, in fact. A century ago, many European anti-semites, including most members of the British government that formulated the Balfour\u00a0Declaration in 1917 to create a “national home” for Jews in Palestine, upheld the same logic as the Zionist movement.\u00a0 They saw the Jews as a race apart. They thought in terms of a “Jewish question”, one that needed solving. And for many, the solution was to export that “problem” far away, out of Europe.<\/p>\n

This was not surprising because Zionism emerged both in reaction to Europe’s ugly ethnic nationalisms \u2013 where it was normal to speak of “races” \u2013 and mirrored these\u00a0nationalisms’ failings.\u00a0The Zionists wanted\u00a0to claim for themselves the\u00a0same traits as other European “races”: nationhood and territory. And the European anti-semites were only too happy to oblige \u001f\u2013 especially if the primary victims were going to be brown people in the colonies, whether in\u00a0Uganda or Palestine.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there is an antidote to\u00a0Beaumont’s kind of stenographic journalism,\u00a0apparently written up after an afternoon at Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem,\u00a0in the form of this interview<\/a> with Norman Finkelstein. It is full of profound insights.<\/p>\n

Finkelstein puts into perspective both Livingstone’s comments and the\u00a0orginal \u201coffending\u201d Facebook post by Labour MP Naz Shah that triggered the latest hysteria. Finkelstein\u00a0notes that the post (one dredged up from two years ago), which shows a map of the United States with Israel superimposed, and suggests resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating Israel to\u00a0the US, was clearly intended to be humorous rather than anti-semitic.<\/p>\n\"shah\"\n

I would make a further point. It is also obvious that the true target of the post is the US, not Jews or even Israel \u2013 making the anti-semitism claim even more ridiculous.<\/p>\n

The post\u2019s implicit argument is that, if the US government and ordinary Americans are really so committed to the creation of a safe haven for Israeli Jews, then would it not be far wiser to locate them inside the US rather than supporting at great expense a garrison state in the Middle East that will always be at war with its neighbours? This is classic satire, and the fact that almost no one in the British media and political establishment can see this \u2013 or, in the case of Corbyn and his allies, afford to admit it \u2013 is the real\u00a0cause\u00a0for concern.<\/p>\n

In addition, Finkelstein concludes with a very powerful argument that the \u201cnew anti-semitism\u201d canard is likely \u2013 and possibly intended \u2013 to fuel the very anti-semitism that it claims to be exposing and\u00a0challenging.<\/p>\n

Here is what Finkelstein says:<\/p>\n

Our Corbyn is Bernie Sanders. In all the primaries in the US, Bernie has been sweeping the Arab and Muslim vote. It\u2019s been a wondrous moment: the first Jewish presidential candidate in American history has forged a principled alliance with Arabs and Muslims. Meanwhile, what are the Blairite-Israel lobby creeps up to in the UK? They\u2019re fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah, a Muslim woman who has attained public office. They\u2019re making her pass through these rituals of public self-degradation, as she is forced to apologise once, twice, three times over for a tongue-in-cheek cartoon reposted from my website. And it\u2019s not yet over! Because now they say she\u2019s on a \u2018journey\u2019. Of course, what they mean is, \u2018she\u2019s on a journey of self-revelation, and epiphany, to understanding the inner antisemite at the core of her being\u2019. But do you know on what journey she\u2019s really on? She\u2019s on a journey to becoming an antisemite. Because of these people; because they fill any sane, normal person with revulsion.<\/p>\n

Here is this Muslim woman MP who is trying to integrate Muslims into British political life, and to set by her own person an example both to British society at large and to the Muslim community writ small. She is, by all accounts from her constituents, a respected and honourable person. You can only imagine how proud her parents, her siblings, must be. How proud the Muslim community must be. We\u2019re always told how Muslim women are oppressed, repressed and depressed, and now you have this Muslim woman who has attained office. But now she\u2019s being crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined, her future in tatters, branded an \u2018antisemite\u2019 and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these rituals of self-abasement. It\u2019s not hard to imagine what her Muslim constituents must think now about Jews. These power hungry creeps are creating new hate by their petty machinations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are desperately in need of some sanity as the British political and media establishment seek to generate yet another \u201cnew anti-semitism\u201d crisis, on this occasion to undermine a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party before the upcoming local elections. Corbyn and his supporters want to revive Labour as a party of social justice, while\u00a0Britain\u2019s elites hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,15,30],"class_list":{"0":"post-2042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-media-on-israel","9":"tag-zionism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}