Chronicle of a death foretold… review of Asa Winstanley

JVL Introduction

JVL web editor Richard Kuper casts a critical eye over Asa Winstanley’s Weaponising Antisemitism in this review published in Political Quarterly.

As with all articles reposted on this website, this review represents the views of its author and is not a statement of a collective JVL view.

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Labour Party expels Jews for ‘antisemitism’

Richard Kuper, Political Quarterly, October 2023

Weaponising Antisemitism. How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, by Asa Winstanley, OR Books, 320 pp. £15

This book will divide its readers. Those who know about or participated in the bitter internecine wars that followed the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in Britain will be infuriated or feel vindicated by turn. (This includes your reviewer who was an active participant.) Those who know little about the last eight years of British politics may well be bemused that so much turned on what someone (often Corbyn) said or didn’t say, meant or didn’t mean, by some off-the-cuff remark made some years earlier.

The author, Asa Winstanley, has spent the better part of the last twenty years as a journalist and an associate editor of the online website, Electronic Intifada, researching and writing about Palestine and Israel and followed developments closely. Perhaps the book is best read as a whodunnit except, in Brechtian fashion, Winstanley emblazons the killer on the front of the book before we begin: it was the Israel lobby that brought Corbyn down. It truly is a chronicle of a death foretold.

The story is told broadly chronologically, with thematic material interwoven where a wider focus is required. It starts with Corbyn’s totally unexpected victory to lead the Labour Party, built on a growing discontent on the left in general and channelling much wider social discontent. It was a rejection of the neoliberalism of Tony Blair’s Labour Party, the fallout from the deceitful war in Iraq and then, of course, the years of austerity that followed the banking crisis of 2008/9.

But, if Corbyn was wildly popular with some, he was bitterly resented by others. Winstanley alludes to many of his enemies early on, particularly the British security establishment (some thirty-four major stories appeared from 2015–19, casting him as a danger to British security), and the mainstream media, implacably hostile from the start. But, above all for Winstanley, it means the Israel lobby, fearing Corbyn for his enthusiastic support for the Palestinian cause.

Winstanley focusses on the Jewish Labour Movement—effectively revived from 2015 in order to combat Corbyn—Labour Friends of Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Community Security Trust, the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News newspapers, as well as the Israeli embassy and the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tasked with undermining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement worldwide. He chronicles their various attempts to intervene in the debates and is adept at drawing out the evidence for their interventions, both overt and covert.

We are taken through the unfolding story as a narrative of ‘Labour’s antisemitism’ came to dominate the headlines: Oxford University’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ in February 2016; Al Jazeera’s exposure in The Lobby of an Israeli agent actively intervening in British political life; the campaign against Ken Livingstone; the rise of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism to the status of holy writ; the split among Jews as left-wingers became increasingly defined as inauthentic— not ‘real’—Jews; to the defeat of Labour in the 2019 general election and Corbyn’s replacement by ‘continuity candidate’, Keir Starmer, only for him to turn his back rapidly on everything he had stood on, and everything that the movement around Corbyn had represented.

One of the few continuities has been the ‘war on antisemitism’. In pursuit of his pledge to ‘tear antisemitism out by its roots’ we now have the bizarre situation in which at least sixty Jewish members of the Labour Party have faced charges related in one way or another to what the party treats as antisemitism. It suggests that something is awfully awry, that the ‘war against antisemitism’ was never what it was said to be.

An aside: your reviewer was a bit player in this. I was found guilty, without a hearing, of ‘undermining the Party’s ability to combat racism [=antisemitism]’ but never told what I was accused of beyond this, or how I had erred, apart from being directed to an article of mine in Red Pepper almost four years earlier, in which I see nothing meriting any such accusation. Neither I, nor anyone else in the party or beyond, can have learnt from this minor persecution anything useful about what constitutes antisemitism, its relation to other forms of racism or how to combat it. That clearly wasn’t its purpose. I was told not to do it again—but have no idea what it is I must not do! I remain a member in good standing of the party.

I agree with much of the story as Winstanley lays it out and find much of his evidence compelling. He argues that the antisemitism crisis was a ‘manufactured crisis’. And the manufactured nature of the crisis is borne out by Winstanley’s forensic analyses of the Oxford University crisis, which was the initial trigger, and the subsequent crises around Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and many more. In all these, the dominant narrative represents a greater or lesser distortion of the reality it claimed to represent, in which these cases were portrayed as mere tips of the iceberg of latent, widespread, cavalier and entrenched ‘antisemitism on the left’ which had entered the Labour Party with Corbyn’s victory. Winstanley is at his best when he questions and probes and undermines the dominant narrative. It simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

None of this is deny that there was and is some antisemitism in the Labour Party as there is in the wider society (clearly present, but much less prevalent than anti-black racism or Islamophobia or Gypsy-Roma-traveller hatred). Evidence also shows it to be much more prevalent on the far right than anywhere else in society. But this antisemitism is only tangentially related to Winstanley’s story of how perceived racism on the left towards one of the least oppressed ethnic groupings in British society came to be presented nationally as ‘an existential threat’ in the absence of any credible evidence. Winstanley reveals much that is relevant to this story of the weaponisation of antisemitism.

But, I find unconvincing the underlying explanatory thesis of the book—that the Israel lobby did it. There was, rather, a confluence of interests in undermining Corbyn and a more nuanced weighing up of these would be in order. All these interests appear at different points in Winstanley’s narrative, but somehow pale before the overriding significance accorded the Israel lobby. Most understated, I believe, is the Labour Party machine itself, for whom Corbyn was anathema, threatening all the accommodations Labour had forged with the establishment, Parliament and other structures of the British state. The Labour Party machine worked hard to undermine Corbyn from day one. Its role was most clearly seen in its exclusion of thousands of putative members in the run-up to the second leadership campaign; its diversion of resources from winnable to safe seats in the interests of right-wing MPs in the 2017 election (the Ergon House scandal); and in how it ran Labour’s disciplinary processes as part of the factional battle against the left in the party. The evidence for this is clear in both the leaked Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party report (2020) and the Forde Report (2022). These leave no doubt that ‘antisemitism’ became at times the weapon of choice in a battle against the left, both nationally and locally. But that doesn’t mean it was the Israel lobby that did it. So many others had their own interest in Corbyn’s defeat and were busy plunging in whatever daggers they could find.

Winstanley does cite Lord Ashcroft’s post election survey, which finds reasons other than the antisemitism crisis (and, by implication, the Israel lobby’s role in it) for Labour’s defeat. In fact, Labour’s failure to deal with the antisemitism crisis comes in at fifth, and Winstanley’s attempt to square the circle with his underlying thesis is unconvincing (‘The poll’s findings amounted to a defeat for the Israel lobby … [but] the lobby in alliance with the British establishment, the Labour Party right and the Israeli state itself had succeeded in convincing a significant chunk of the wider British establishment that there probably was no smoke without fire’).

Nevertheless, despite this disagreement, I commend this book highly as an essential source for anyone trying to understand the Corbyn phenomenon, one of the most radical movements ever to attempt to disrupt the British establishment in modern times.

It provides rich material for evaluating its defeat.

Richard Kuper was a founder member of Free Speech on Israel and is the web editor of Jewish Voice for Labour