We always said weaponising antisemitism was dangerous. Now it’s being used to justify genocide.
JVL introduction
Since October 2023, the utter horrors that Israel is visiting upon the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon have given rise to some exemplary journalism in the UK as well as elsewhere.
Drawing on the heroism and professionalism of Palestinian reporters, photographers and film makers, risking and often sacrificing their lives to inform the world of Israel’s unchecked brutality, commentators like Nesrine Malik, Owen Jones, Rivkah Brown and Rachel Shabi have given voice to the outrage felt by masses of people denied reliable news from mainstream media.
These are journalists who have better access to widely read platforms than most of the pro-Palestinian left. They have stood against increasingly hysterical allegations of antisemitism from pro-Israel lobbyists in order to report and analyse the unfolding genocide and should be congratulated for that.
But not all of them were such staunch allies in the past…
In this article Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi expresses the hope that there will now be a shared recognition that the absurdly exaggerated and weaponised use of antisemitism allegations in the present has its precursor in the politically motivated, massively overstated wave of such allegations against many of Jeremy Corbyn’s allies between 2015 and 2020.
“Recognising the witch hunt for what it was,” she writes, “is essential if the British Left is to recover from defeat. We can at one and the same time acknowledge the deep trauma and fear that colours many Jews’ perception of the world while standing against a cynical campaign to destroy the pro-Palestinian, anti-colonial movement by exploiting those fears, even at the cost of stoking actual antisemitism.”
A new book about the pernicious influence of the global arms trade bears the title “Monstrous Anger of the Guns”, taken from Wilfred Owens’ World War One poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. For over a year we have witnessed a truly monstrous deployment of weapons of war to kill and destroy in Palestine and wider. . Such acts require the monstrous manipulation of ideas, justifying the slaughter by means of brazen weaponisation of antisemitism and abuse of memory of the Holocaust.
To ask why the Hamas attack in October 2023 occurred, to query the ferocity of the response, to express sympathy for Palestinian as well as Israeli victims of violence, or indeed to make any observation critical of Israel, has been to invite charges of supporting terror and advocating a new Holocaust against Jews.
Israel targeted United Nations general secretary Antonio Guterres in October 2023, demanding his resignation if he did not retract a statement that “October 7 did not happen in a vacuum”. Israeli representatives wore yellow stars to a UN session, deliberately evoking Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe. In September 2024 Benjamin Netanyahu called the UN “a swamp of antisemitic bile”. In November, pro-Israel vigilantes in London staged demonstrations against UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, alleging “an appalling history of Holocaust inversion and worse.”
In the US a legal strategy compiled by a conservative think tank close to president-elect Trump aims to suppress expressions of sympathy for Palestinians under the guise of combatting “the scourge of antisemitism” by employing counterterrorism laws against what would otherwise be protected speech.
A definition misused
Examples of attempts to muzzle pro-Palestinian artists, academics, journalists, activists and sporting personalities are legion. The case of former Scottish cricket international Qasim Sheikh deserves attention. He was dumped as a commentator by the BBC after pro-Israel advocates at the BBC banded together to accuse him, totally unjustly, of “justifying and legitimising mass murder of Jews in Israel.” They alleged that “Invoking images of Hitler (specifically) to portray Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, and its allies is Holocaust inversion and antisemitic by every definition.”
In fact it is their allegation that misuses every definition of antisemitism. For a statement to be antisemitic it has to be linked to abusive or discriminatory intentions towards Jews.
Jewish Voice for Labour has produced a response to the allegation that comparisons with the Nazi period are always antisemitic. Criticism of Israel can be exaggerated, unjust or even antisemitic, but comparisons to Nazi Germany are usually an expression of outrage at Israel’s inhuman treatment of the Palestinians. Since October 2023 the comparison has been supported over and over again by vivid evidence flooding the internet.
The Nazi comparison is just one of a number of statements about Israel that its propagandists have attempted to outlaw over the past decade – with a high degree of success thanks to the widespread adoption of a new definition of antisemitism which focuses on criticism of the state of Israel and its Zionist ideology, rather than on hostility to or discrimination against Jewish people.
The “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism” is a threat to freedom of speech and expression, prompting a host of international scholars in antisemitism studies and related fields to propose an alternative, the Jerusalem Declaration. Antony Lerman, former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, wrote a piece in the Independent as long ago as August 2019, with the title I warned that adopting the IHRA would shut down Palestinian protest – I’ve been proved right.
The truth about Israel
The horrific events since October 2023 are particularly shocking to people seeing the truth about Israel for the first time. It is a truth denied by most Western governments despite the evidence on everyone’s TV screens, and we are witnessing mind-bending arguments used to underpin the denial. Take for example former US president Bill Clinton’s speech claiming that Israelis “were there first, before their faith [Islam] existed” as though that justifies everything Israel is doing. This assertion muddles together a number of untruths – that Palestinians are all Muslims; that Israel is engaged in a battle over faith; that Israeli Jews are descended from a distinct people who are the only true natives of Palestine; that Palestinian Arabs are recent interlopers.
The absurdities of this kind of Zionist manipulation are brilliantly captured in Michael Rosen’s King and Tutor dialogues.
Smoke and mirrors
It is important to be very clear about what is going on here. Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians in order to justify their dispossession goes hand in hand with its demonisation of critics of Zionism, primarily by alleging antisemitism. This is not by any means a new tactic, as comprehensively documented in Antony Lerman’s book Whatever happened to antisemitism? reviewed here by Richard Kuper.
Among the numerous reasons for challenging this whole narrative is the evident damage it does to Jews, by implicating us all in an ethno-centric Zionist project which, over the decades, has led to multiple crimes against humanity. What better way could there be to generate a wave of hostility towards Jews worldwide than to claim that Israel’s actions, including its war crimes, are being done on behalf of all Jews!
Israel’s defenders depend on antisemitism as a real or imagined threat and engage in contorted smoke and mirrors performances to keep it at the centre of public discourse. Witness for example the portrayal of violent, racist Israeli football fans in Amsterdam on November 6/7 as the innocent victims of antisemitic attacks.
Current, extreme manifestations of weaponisation in the UK have their roots in the invention many decades ago of the “new antisemitism”, claiming that critics of Israel are motivated by prejudice against, and hatred of Israel as the “collective Jew”. This claim is central to the IHRA definition referred to above. Its adoption by the Labour Party when Corbyn was leader was a major strategic error – a decision taken in the mistaken belief that compromising with the Zionist lobby on the definition would put a stop to attacks on the pro-Palestinian left. As Antony Lerman pointed out at the time, this was at best wishful thinking:
The fact is that the damage has already been done. The default mode of almost all the mainstream media is to take as given that the party is institutionally antisemitic. And that its leader is either incapable or unwilling to do anything about it, except make pious statements that are ignored… Too many people and organizations have a vested interest in not letting Corbyn or the party off the hook.
Significantly, the American Jewish academic who authored the document on which the IHRA definition is based, Kenneth Stern, has distanced himself from the way it has been used, not only in the UK: “I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Right Wing Jews have weaponized it”.
Not only did the attacks on the Labour left continue unabated, leading ultimately to the removal of Corbyn from the party, they gathered force and spread across the political spectrum, the media, academia, local government and the arts. The monstrous idea of “new antisemitism” has been normalised, demonising the left and letting the right, which is the incubator of most racist ideas including antisemitism, off the hook.
From solidarity to authoritarianism
Clearly then, just as the history of Palestine/Israel did not begin on October 7, 2023, neither did the weaponisation of antisemitism allegations against the left.
In the British Labour Party, for a few short years after 2015, we witnessed a brief blossoming of international solidarity with Palestinians and other victims of oppression, along with anti-colonialism, anti-militarism and openness to transformative socialist ideas. A party that was capable in 2018 of turning its conference floor into a sea of Palestinian flags, is now ruled by a man who will not permit a critical word about Israel to be uttered, mentioning genocide is outlawed and young protesters calling for environmental action and justice for Palestine are evicted from the hall.
This collapse was made possible by attacks on Corbyn and thousands of his supporters starting the moment he walked into the Leader of the Opposition’s office. They faced an unprecedented witch hunt spear-headed by lobby organisations such as the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign against Antisemitism, Labour Against Antisemitism and We Stand with Israel. These were far from the only forces working for Corbyn’s demise. He faced a coordinated attack from a defence establishment which feared his anti-Nato neutrality, a Labour Party parliamentary party whose members feared for their careers, the Labour Party bureaucracy and the media. All of them jointly seized upon the antisemitism weapon and wielded it with gusto. JVL and a few small left groups resisted capitulation and paid the price, being proscribed as organisations or seeing their members suspended, investigated and expelled.
Public evisceration of left-wing pro-Palestinian individuals became a national blood sport gleefully engaged in by the political class and media, with the BBC and Guardian at the forefront. From high-profile figures such as Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and Ken Loach, to humble activists in local branches, many of them Jewish, their exclusion laid the foundations for the current situation.
The result is a government headed by the most right-wing Labour Party in generations, trade unions offering no significant challenge, a shrinking Labour left under siege, and mass campaigning organisations such as Stop the War and Stand up to Racism nervously watching their backs, self-censoring and second-guessing what may or may not be said.
Recognising the witch hunt for what it was is essential if the British Left is to recover from defeat. We can at one and the same time acknowledge the deep trauma and fear that colours many Jews’ perception of the world while standing against a cynical campaign to destroy the pro-Palestinian, anti-colonial movement by exploiting those fears, even at the cost of stoking actual antisemitism.
The biters bit
The horrors being visited upon the people of Palestine and Lebanon have shocked many in the UK who previously believed Israel’s propaganda about itself as defender of the civilised West in a global War on Terror against Arab/Muslim barbarism.
Incredulous outrage has resulted in sharp criticism of the far-right messianists running Israel today from some who previously refused to listen to warnings about the ethnonationalist character and direction of the Zionist state and the mendacious behaviour of its apologists. A few who actively participated in the demonisation of Corbyn’s supporters now find themselves having to rebut similar charges against themselves.
James O’Brien for example, the LBC radio presenter who in 2020 derisively dismissed any defence of Corbyn over antisemitism charges, including by this author, now finds himself accused of “stirring up a tsunami of hatred against the Jewish community in the UK” for condemning the ongoing slaughter.
Owen Jones deserves particular attention. He has produced a raft of impassioned, impeccably researched articles, podcasts and youtube videos, revealing the depths of the depravity and cruelty of the Israeli military assault on the people of Palestine, the delusional victimhood of the Zionist state and its apologists and the complicity of Western political leaders, pundits and media. He has a considerable following on social media and remains a Guardian columnist, though with reduced visibility since taking up the Palestinian cause so vociferously. He now faces the ire of people like Hadley Freeman, writing in the Jewish Chronicle, saying Jones “once promised to wage ‘an all-out war on antisemitism’” but is now not a journalist at all, “simply a propagandist”. In similar vein, another contributor to the Jewish Chronicle, Hen Mazzig, accused Jones of “a penchant for spreading sensationalist anti-Israel content.”
Regrettably Jones’s “war on antisemitism” enmeshed him in the “new antisemitism” campaign that brought down Corbyn, from which he appears, so far, unable to extricate himself. In contrast to NovaraMedia’s Ash Sarkar and Rivkah Brown, he has yet to distance himself from accusations levied unjustly against people on the left such as Jewish, formerly Labour, now Green councillor Jo Bird and Black Jewish former Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker.
Jones is however associated with a project called We Deserve Better which supported independent socialist and Green candidates including Bird in the July 2024 general election. This is a potentially significant development in a situation where, as Jackie Walker says, the left requires unity and solidarity if it is to recover from a colossal defeat.
Rachel Shabi is another important writer and commentator who has not held back from criticising Israel’s war on Gaza, for which she has been called “an asshole” in a swiftly-deleted post on Board of Deputies of British Jews social media.
Shabi’s writing shows a subtle understanding of the interplay between genuine Jewish fears and their cynical invocation to justify right-wing government clampdowns on free speech and to police “who is deemed an appropriate representative of British Jewry on the subject of the Gaza war.”
However she is another, like Jones, who supported Corbyn but failed to defend those who fell victim to the weaponisation of antisemitism, accusing us of being “tin-eared”, not listening to genuine Jewish concerns. Her new book, Off-White: The truth about antisemitism, while helping build confidence in distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism, nonetheless re-iterates her earlier criticisms of the left.
Learn the lessons
It is possible that Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters might have had more success disarming our opponents if we had collectively shown more understanding for the trauma behind many Jews’ sensitivity about aggressive criticisms of Israel. JVL has certainly done its best, through its education work, to explain it.
But all the evidence points to a total absence of willingness from the pro-Israel side to allow a millimetre of leeway to anyone contradicting the Zionist narrative. Even Keir Starmer, ardent friend of Israel that he is, has been accused by Labour Against Antisemitism of encouraging antisemitism by dropping UK objections to the International Criminal Court case against Israel’s war criminals, restoring funding to UNRWA and considering formally recognising Palestinian statehood.
It is very hard to reclaim the freedom to talk honestly about Palestine, Zionism and antisemitism when a respected journal like the London Review of Books still feels happy to publish a piece by Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite repeating old lies and distortions about the Corbyn period, uncritically citing antisemitism allegations that have been decisively debunked and praising Starmer for a speech saying that antisemitism had been ‘a stain’ on Labour. (In fairness, the LRB did subsequently publish a letter from Conrad Teixeira demolishing the allegations in the piece .)
Belief in a nicer, kinder Israel
That this is still possible may be due to a residual belief among many leftish commentators that Israel’s brutality towards Palestinians is a specific feature of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet, and that without them, after Gaza’s total obliteration, a nicer, kinder Israel will enter good faith negotiations towards a peaceful future for all between the river and the sea. Given the wholehearted support most Israeli citizens are giving to the ongoing slaughter, cheered on by friends abroad, such a view seems unrealistic. But those who hold to it may be inclined to a misplaced sympathy for Zionists pleading hurt and offence when criticised.
The British left is currently in disarray and needs above all to rebuild unity and solidarity to counter the growth of the racist right on the streets and in parliament. Despite inspiring grassroots mobilisations in defence of Palestine, against the far right, in environmental movements and other necessary and important campaigns, we are – as so often in the past – divided.
The lessons of 2015-20 must be learned, recognising both the failure to build a democratic bottom-up movement strong enough to resist establishment attacks, and also the betrayals, compromises and capitulations that gutted the activist base from within.
These cannot be brushed under the carpet. Left anti-Zionists, Jewish and otherwise, who suffered harm due to the weaponisation of antisemitism need to be exonerated and a robust critique of how weaponisation works integrated into a new movement of the left, whatever form it may take. Without that, however pure its broad principles, it will be built on shaky foundations.
Editor’s note: The paragraph beginning ‘The “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)….”‘ has been corrected (12.15 December 11), removing reference to Antony Lerman as a signatory to the Jerusalem Declaration.
If the Palestinians had been treated fairly and as equals in the first place, none of this so-called antisemitism (criticism of Israel) would have arisen. And the reality is – and all the false accusers know it of course, including Netanyahu and Co – that not only would October 7th have never happened if that had been the case, but this so-called antisemitism would disappear overnight if Israel were to start behaving like human beings and do unto others as they would have them do unto them… Instead of the complete and absolute opposite.
What an exisistence… the only alledged democracy in the Middle East – and its minions around the world – having to scream ANTISEMITISM! and ANTISEMITES! at all and sundry all the time and smear and demonise them, and dupe and deceive and manipulate the masses, ffs.
It really is time to grow up and help create a new peaceful and harmonious world. You can do it if you really want to, and you HAVE to, because the alternative is oblivion…. Because THAT is where you are leading us all, one way or the other, presently.
We should be clear that there is a direct line between taking out the pro-Palestinian left/Corbyn, and the horror of Gaza, as Corbyn would have recognised Palestine along with others internationally and put pressure on Israel to recognise Palestinian rights such that Gaza may not have happened.
This makes the conversion of people like Owen Jones very hard to take – it would help if he said sorry I was wrong and unblock the many left accounts he’s blocked.
Ash Sarkar and Rivkah Brown are also in this camp so I don’t agree with Naomi. Their attacks on Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson still stand as does Brown’s awful take on the Panorama on ‘Labour antisemitism’.
The only writer who has apologised is Peter Oborne.
Naomi says maybe we should have shown more understanding towards Zionist Jews but this misses the point that the ‘antisemitism crisis’ weaponised traditional antisemitism as a dual purpose smear to take out socialists and the Palestinian cause. The only way to fight this was head on and early and not to throw people under the bus as Corbyn did.
And a political reckoning with Zionism is a far greater task and wasn’t and isn’t even in Corbyn’s world view as a two-state person. The sensitivities towards the Jewish state were already there and it is the Palestinians who were and are the key focus.
Last year JVL reposted a biographical article of mine about the personal experience of structural, sometimes violent, regular racism, that Black-Britons experience – it had been intended to help Muslims resist the experience of gaslighting when complaining of establishment racism. In comparison to our often-unrecognised experience, I noted in support of Israel
“the BBC covered a story of a Jewish Israel supporting student being squirted with brown sauce on a university campus. They gave this web article more length than any individual article covering 82yr old grandad Muhammad Saleem being murdered in a racist attack and his killer planting bombs at three different Mosques.”
After this summer’s race riots, I was followed out of a small local Mall and down the road by two white men who from their car hurled racist slurs at me. Thankfully it did not last too long because the traffic built up behind them forcing them to speed off. Within the same few weeks, a Jamaican-British friend of mine was walking down the street, a when passing white woman said to her daughters,
“if I give you chocolate would you kiss the monkey”?
Obviously, if we had been white and Israel supporters, the precedents suggest these accounts would have been reported in the news media, as part of its regular pro-Israel moral panics. As it is both of us are ‘just Black-Britons’ and expected to accept this as part of the regular fabric of our lives.
See: Pressure: A personal reflection on British and Western Establishment Racism
by Gavin Lewis, Arena Online
https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/article/racism-truly-the-personal-is-political/
Naomi writes: ‘“Recognising the witch hunt for what it was,” she writes, “is essential if the British Left is to recover from defeat. We can at one and the same time acknowledge the deep trauma and fear that colours many Jews’ perception of the world’
I agree with the first half and disagree with the second half.
That is why five of us have written an Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn saying that ‘It’s Time To Admit that Under Your Leadership Thousands of Labour Members were Victim of False Allegations of Anti-Semitism’
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2024/12/open-letter-to-jeremy-corbyn-its-time.html
Under Jeremy the belief took hold that if they expelled more and more people then the Board of Deputies and JLM would stop attacking them for tolerating anti-Semitism. In fact the opposite occurred. The more expulsions there were the more the Zionist narrative was confirmed.
It is incumbent upon Jeremy to admit that he got it wrong. The JLM was never concerned about anti-Semitism as its present support for genocide in Gaza confirms.
I don’t accept that a ‘deep trauma and fear [that] colours many Jews’ perception of the world’. Unfortunately all too many Jews have adopted the settler colonial mentality of Israeli settler colonialism. That is what
How else to explain e.g. the reports of French Jews being fearful because the Left outperformed Marine Le Pen in the elections? If this trauma was real then they would have feared the victory of a successor to Vichy France.
It’s time we dispensed with this talk of ‘holocaust trauma’. It is nothing of the kind, it’s settler colonial trauma, the fear that the indigenous population will visit on Israel what it has visited on others.
Marc said: ‘The only way to fight this [the A/S smear campaign] was head on and early and not to throw people under the bus as Corbyn did’
Could you elaborate as to just HOW, exactly, Jeremy could have combatted the A/S smear campaign head on, Marc. During the past eight years or so I have said time and time again that the MSM have total control of the narrative, and they go on proving the point again and again and again. Just about everyone on the left knows that Putin/Russia WAS provoked into taking military action in Ukraine to prevent Nato ending up being parked on their border, and just about everyone on the left knows that numerous foreign policy experts during the past twenty-five years or more warned about the danger and likely outcome of moving Nato further and further eastwards. But the vast majority of people in the West – and in Ukraine itself – not only don’t know the reality, but have been fed and led to believe a completely different narrative by the war-mongers and their propaganda machine. And ditto Gaza, in effect.
As I have said repeatedly (on here and elsewhere), Jeremy was in a no-win situation and there was absolutely nothing he could have done or said that wouldn’t have led to the forces ranged against him attacking and condemning him, albeit falsely and fraudulently.
And I really REALLY don’t get why there are people that just don’t get it. But if you think I’m wrong, then please tell me exactly what you think Jeremy could have said to counter the A/S black op, because despite asking people to do so on many occasions, no-one ever has.
Owen Jones is essentially a liberal who feels more than he thinks. He certainly doesn’t understand geo-politics and is therefore incapable of offering any strategic clarity for tackling Israel and western imperialism – which Israel is a product of. The pro-Israel lobby is very much a tool of western geo-political strategy. If the British ‘Left’ is to resurface it needs a cool critique of this strategy. For liberals like Owen this is hard to do because conflict is inevitably ‘messy’ and occasionally bloody. He prefers to maintain the ‘moral high-ground’ and sometimes therefore loses a sense of proportion. If you relegate the struggle for global emancipation PURELY to a moral battle between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, enemy propaganda will triumph and people like Owen will fall silent in its face. I remember Vietnam, South Africa and now Ukraine.
People need to study the derivation of ‘semitic’ and ‘anti-semitic’. The original word, as Edward Said points out, was developed by European orientalists, including racists. The ‘anti’ was added by European racists in the 1870s.
The Palestinians, like Arabs more generally, as well as Jews and other linguistic groups speak a semitic language.
The idea that there is some sort of specialised racism, as opposed to a distinctive form of racism, for one particular group is an example of a ‘hierarchy of the oppressed’.
Unity is strength. Thanks to JVL for publishing this article.
What happens if we slightly reconfigure the discussion so that it’s less about Zionism and Jews and more about the US? What if instead of saying the the US (and the UK) are ‘complicit’ or are ‘allies’ to what’s happened and is happening, but that the US ‘drives’ or ‘runs’ or ‘pursues’ a policy in the Middle East of which Israel, Zionism and Jews are a part? Ruling orders are as much planners and plotters as they are opportunists, surely. The Middle East has seen a changing ‘confluence’ or ‘coincidence’ of interests over several hundred years, eg British Imperialism, the discovery of oil, Zionism, Christian Zionism (feel free to add others). At this moment, we are seeing the flowering (wrong word) of massive US military power. It’s not logical to imagine that this is being used purely in order to serve the interests of one state or one people. One local expression of that, is that the UK (and other allies) must not be centres of opposition to that power and that’s why the pro-Palestine, anti-capitalist left had to be removed from one of the major political parties here. I guess this comment, then, is informed by the axiom: better to tackle the cause rather than the symptom.
Corbyn’s record in regard to standing up against false accusations of antisemitism is not entirely unblemished either. Unfortunately, he failed to defend leftwing anti Zionist campaigners such as Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone. In the end, as leader of the Labour Party,he accepted the IRHA definition of antisemitism. On the other hand, he did his best to try and assuage the Zionist community concerning their fears of antisemitism but to no avail
Listening to Illan Pape on the “Lobby” It is clear that anti Palestinian racism is embedded in the leadership of the. Labour Party. And with Starmer in charge this will only be reinforced.
We are very unlikely going to see any change in the trajectory of Israel now on a genocidal path. The younger generation of Israelis are even more racist than their forefathers, having been brought up under a system of Apartheid and Occupation.
But the key to this, as Michael Rosen has commented, is the United States for whom Israel and the West are client states. Nothing could be clearer from the current situation in Syria where Israel is doing it’s best to deny the possibility of Syria becoming a strong state.
There are signs of change in the US, from the younger generation of intelligentsia, including many Jewish young people. It is possible we might be seeing a growing movement along the lines of the Anti-apartheid movement both within the States and elsewhere. This will however take some time before we’re likely to see any substantial results. We’re in for a long game unfortunately.
As I’ve said on numerous occasions during the past seven/eight years, Jeremy was in a no-win situation, and the reason he was in a no-win situation is because the corporate media and the semi-corporate, Tory run-and-controlled BBC, have total control of the narrative and, as such, gave a platform to Jeremy and the left’s enemies, and credibility to their lies and falsehoods and smears. And there was no way on this planet that the establishment were ever gonna let Jeremy win a GE and become PM, and they did everything they did to make sure he didn’t (and would have done MORE if it had been necessary). In other words, to blame Jeremy for Starmer now running the country (as some people do) is unreasonable and fallacious. It was never gonna happen (much as we all hoped and believed that it could, and hoped and believed that it would).
The PTB obviously got a fright when Jeremy came so close to winning in 2017, and that of course is why they then trebled down with theiir smears and demonisation afterwards (albeit not immediately, as that would have been too obvious to many of those who voted for Labour and him).
If Jeremy had defended Ken and Jackie and Marc and Chris etc he would have been attacked and condemned and vilified for doing so, of course, and it’s disingenuous to blame Jeremy instead of those who conspired to sabotage his leadership and destroy him and, as such, subvert democracy. Jeremy is not a fascist of course, the complete opposite, but THEY *are*. And believe me, they’d be locking us up in concentration camps if they thought they could get away with it….
Of course Jeremy was on a losing wicket. Nevertheless he did not help himself or those on the left by backtracking on his position in the belief that that might reduce the criticism he was having or help us gain power.
It’s clear whenever he tried to appease the media it did not work. He only put himself and ourselves in a worse position.
I think we need to be honest about Jeremy’s tactical weakness, not just blame others for standing their ground if we are develop a more successful fight against the weaponisation of antisemitism.
JW is on the money. I would add that it’s well and truly time to move on from Corbyn and Labour if your serious about anti imperialism.
It’s probably too late to comment on this, but here goes. Everyone here knows that the immediate pragmatic contradiction that Corbyn faced was that the membership had voted for him but the Parliamentary Labour Party opposed him. From that one simple institutional and organisational fact, everything else flows. No one, whatever their political views, can sustain a position of leadership in the face of that. Trying to work out what other policies he could have put in place, or what other balancing tricks he could have done, or which particular people he could have or should have defended/attacked/ignored is in my view irrelevant. He was in an unsustainable position – given that that’s how the Labour Party was structured constitutionally.
With all due respect to Michael, if the boot was on the other foot – thereby inverting the structural dynamics he describes – the neoliberal Labour right, would have had used equivalent grassroots dominance to have regular reselections to drive out traditional Labour leftist MPs. This is what J-Corbyn could have attempted. JC’s mistake was to believe he was presiding over a traditional Labour Party of an enthusiastic radical left and cautious right but both roughly heading in the same direction, which he as leader would try and harness together. But these neoliberal entryists are not a traditional Labour right, other than as an asset have no interest in the Party, its history, extended affiliated familial links, popping up to the Durham Miners Gala, or using trade union power beyond its functional service to their careers. They’re part of a pattern of anti-democratic corruption of progressive parties worldwide created by lobbying money, chased by carpet-baggers also pursuing the promise of advancement under US empire global hegemony. Given that no ruthlessness is beyond them, a similar single-mindedness in response, seems required.
“JC’s mistake was to believe he was presiding over a traditional Labour Party of an enthusiastic radical left”
Is that the same Labour Party that under Attlee, was rabidly anti-communist, and liked to smash the odd anti-colonial struggle here and there, or the elitist Fabians ?
When are people going to get the rose tinted spectacles off about Labour ?
Attlee’s government was probably limited by its place in history but as well as establishing and enlarging the Welfare State, building a million council houses, inventing the NHS and more…
“Attlee’s government also presided over the decolonisation of India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon and Jordan”
That said it also presided over the invention Israel. See source – https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/clement-attlee
Ok, and it also suppressed the struggles for independence and national liberation in the Gold Coast, Nigeria and Iran, but especially in Malaya, where the Labour government waged a bloody colonial war for over three years.
It also became the junior ally of the US government, seeing in this relationship the main means to retain a dominant role for British finance capital in the world.