“Weaponising Antisemitism”: a review
JVL Introduction
Investigative journalist Asa Winstanley, associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, has long been a relentless critic of the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinian people – and of Britain and others’ complicity in this.
In the last seven years he has written frequently about the relentless campaign to bring down Jeremy Corbyn. His new book Weaponising Antisemitism draws his arguments together into a unified whole and bears the strapline “How the Israel lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn”.
In the review below Deborah Maccoby assesses the strength of his argument, expresses some reservations, and concludes that “ taken as a whole, [it is] a very courageous exposé of a taboo subject”.
Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn
Or Books, 2023, 310pp
A review by Deborah Maccoby
The very last phrase of Weaponising Antisemitism is “a very Israeli coup”. This is a reference to Chris Mullin’s famous 1982 novel A Very British Coup (which was turned into a highly successful Channel 4 TV series). Mullin’s book tells the story of Harry Perkins, a Socialist who – after becoming Leader of the Labour Party as a result of a change in voting rules — manages to become Prime Minister, to the fury of the UK and US Establishments. MI5 and the CIA join together in efforts to topple him; and in the end he is brought down by a Profumo-like sex scandal (or at least the threat of one; he resigns ostensibly on grounds of ill-health, and it is all done in a discreet “British” way).
Of course, the Tory tabloids looked into Corbyn’s personal life; but all they ever managed to dig up was a brief relationship in the 1970s between Corbyn, after his separation from his first wife, and Diane Abbott, with whom he went on a motorbike tour of East Germany – hardly the stuff of heady scandal.[1] Instead of a sex scandal, the Establishment came up with what appeared to Corbyn’s enemies to be a no less promising alternative: an antisemitism smear campaign.
Weaponising Antisemitism is a history of the antisemitism smear campaign as conducted within the Labour Party. After an introductory chapter about Corbyn’s background and the forces ranged against him, we move to an outline of the history of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM); then to the beginning of the smear campaign in accusations of antisemitism against members of the Oxford Labour Club; then we come to the book’s central argument, about the revelations contained in the Al-Jazeera TV series “The Lobby”. This is followed by the Ken Livingstone row; the McCarthyite witch-hunt that developed against more and more Labour activists; the conflict between the two Jewish groups within Labour, Jewish Voice for Labour versus the Jewish Labour Movement; then “The Turning Point”, an assessment of the pivotal significance of the capitulation over the IHRA antisemitism definition row and failure to push back against Margaret Hodge’s verbal attack on Corbyn. The book ends with “The Fall-Out”, about the disaster of the 2019 General Election defeat.
Winstanley’s most revelatory claims centre around the 2017 Al-Jazeera TV series “The Lobby”, which features “Robin”, an undercover reporter, and his conversations with various people who worked at the time for the Israeli Embassy, Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The central figure in “The Lobby” and in Winstanley’s book is Shai Masot, a young Israeli who had been working at the Israeli Embassy for an unspecified period of time; his business card stated that he was the Embassy’s “senior political officer” (p. 107). Masot was caught on camera plotting with a British civil servant to “take down” Sir Alan Duncan, a sympathizer with the Palestinian cause who was at that time a senior minister in the Foreign Office. Winstanley writes that, after Masot had been exposed on Al-Jazeera:
the Israeli ambassador apologised to the British government and Masot was sent home. He seems to have been thrown under the bus by his superiors. The Embassy distanced itself from Masot claiming that he was only junior, temporary staff and that he was not a diplomat. The latter point was technically true, since Masot did not appear on the diplomatic lists. But that only begs the wider question of why Masot – who had worked closely with the Ambassador himself – was allowed to pass himself off as a diplomat when he was not. Documents later exposed by the Electronic Intifiada show that Masot was likely an agent for the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Israel’s semi-covert global agency dedicated to carrying out sabotage operations against BDS and the wider Palestine solidarity movement (p. 107).
An Electronic Intifada (EI) article by the author is linked to here in a footnote; the piece does indeed provide strong evidence – though, as Winstanley puts it, the conclusion is “likely”, rather than completely certain – that Masot was an agent for the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.[2]
Winstanley reaches the conclusion that both LFI and the JLM (whose first paid Director, Ella Rose, was hired straight out of the Israeli Embassy, where she had been an officer) were, at the time of the smear campaign, “front groups” (pp. 120 and 117, respectively) for the Israeli Embassy. “Robin”, the undercover reporter, was tasked with setting up “Young LFI”. Michael Rubin, a paid LFI Parliamentary Officer (who, Winstanley suggests (p. 98) in the Oxford chapter, could have been involved, together with Masot, in helping to orchestrate the Oxford Labour Club antisemitism smear campaign; there is some evidence to indicate this), is seen in the Al-Jazeera series warning Robin:
“We’ve got to be careful, because there are some people who would be happy to be involved in a Young LFI, but wouldn’t necessarily be happy if it were seen as an embassy thing” (p. 106).
However, Winstanley also points out that this likely takeover by the Israeli Embassy of the two moribund groups was only possible because of the weakness of the Israel Lobby in the Labour Party before the takeovers. Winstanley quotes (p. 109) Masot saying, in the Al-Jazeera series:
“For years, every Labour MP that joined the parliament, the first thing that they used to do is go to join the LFI. They’re not doing it anymore in the Labour Party. For CFI [Conservative Friends of Israel], they are doing it automatically.”
Winstanley makes a strong and compelling case, based upon years of investigation, and substantiated by references to his original research for EI written at this time. He goes on to point out (p. 127) that the “initial Labour Party response” to the Al-Jazeera revelations “was outrage. Jeremy Corbyn and his foreign affairs spokesperson Emily Thornberry both called for an inquiry.” But these calls were later dropped, for the reason, Winstanley believes, that “a Labour inquiry would have revealed too many uncomfortable truths about the inordinate influence the Israel Lobby has on the party” (p. 127).
Winstanley courageously lifts the lid on a topic that is regarded as taboo, because (even though LFI and JLM include many non-Jews), the accusation that Jews like Michael Rubin, Ella Rose and Jeremy Newmark (the first leader of the JLM who was later discredited for alleged financial fraud) were plotting, from positions embedded within the Labour Party, with a foreign (and Jewish) state to bring down the British Leader of the Opposition is an accusation that resonates with age-old antisemitic “tropes” of Jews as treacherous and disloyal (this stereotype was particularly apparent in the Dreyfus Affair and goes back to the story in the Gospels of Judas betraying Jesus). But Winstanley’s claims are presented, in my view, in a completely non-antisemitic way.
I do, however, have some problems with the book’s last phrase “a very Israeli coup”. Winstanley himself brings out in the first chapter the fact that it was also “a very British coup”; he points out that “British journalists, editors and politicians showed extreme dedication to reversing the Labour membership’s most democratic selection of the party’s most left-wing leader since it was founded” (p. 14). In my JVL review[3] of Hil Aked’s book Friends of Israel—a book published at almost the same time as Weaponising Antisemitism and covering part of the same ground – I queried Aked’s arguments (a) that the antisemitism accusations against the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership were not, in any sense, a smear campaign; and (b) that the involvement of the Israeli Embassy iin setting up over 40“Friends of Israel” groups in the UK did not constitute “foreign interference”.
Winstanley’s book serves as a vital corrective to these contentions; but Aked’s book serves as a corrective to what seems to me to be Winstanley’s over-emphasis on the “foreign interference”. I wrote in my review of Aked’s book that Aked lays stress (pp. 26-28) on the fact that Jewish communal organisations are deeply embedded in the British Establishment, which itself has a vested interest in support for Israel. For Jewish communal organisations such as the Board of Deputies (BoD) or the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), the main issue, rather than being Israel, seems, in my view, to have been preventing a socialist from becoming Prime Minister of the UK. The “foreign interference” of the Israeli Embassy and MFA seem to me to have been just part of the mix, rather than the main element.
But my main problem is with the book’s subtitle. “How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn”. The implication here is that it was the antisemitism smear campaign that was the main cause of Labour’s disastrous defeat in the 2019 General Election. Is this true? Winstanley himself refers us (p. 252) to a BBC article about a survey, conducted by Lord Ashcroft, of British voters in the 2019 General Election. This survey[4] found, as Winstanley himself points out (p. 253), that the antisemitism issue only came fifth among the factors cited by voters as reasons for why they did not vote Labour. The factor that came second was Brexit – and it seems to me that Oliver Eagleton’s book The Starmer Project[5] makes it clear that Keir Starmer’s policy of shifting Labour in the direction of a second referendum and Remain was far more responsible for Labour’s 2019 election defeat than were the efforts of the antisemitism smear campaign. As Len McCluskey writes in his memoir Always Red: “I don’t believe antisemitism was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Darlington or Doncaster in the 2019 General Election.” However, McCluskey goes on:
But it was part of toxifying Corbyn. It made it more difficult to reconjure the hope and optimism of the 2017 campaign. It disheartened and divided our own members and supporters. And it demoralised Jeremy himself, a man with not a racist bone in his body. It struck at the heart of his politics, at his strongest point, not his weakest. But ultimately it would be another issue, Brexit, that would bring him down.[6]
The first reason given by voters for not voting Labour was “Jeremy Corbyn was not an appealing leader”. This seems to have arisen from Corbyn’s tragic inability to counter both the antisemitism smears and the shift towards Remain – he was felt by voters not to be a strong leader; as Winstanley puts it (p. 264), he lacked “a killer instinct”. This fatal flaw as a leader in Corbyn’s character forms a significant part of the final chapters of Weaponising Antisemitism – chapters that detail Corbyn’s inability to push back against the smear campaign or to defend its victims (including himself).
I have some problems with Winstanley’s account of the Ken Livingstone affair – Winstanley spends pages and pages showing convincingly that Livingstone was historically correct to say that “Hitler was supporting Zionism”; but Winstanley never at any point considers the question of whether it was diplomatically wise to make these remarks. I find the same lack of nuance in Winstanley’s claim (p. 49) that “Zionism has always been a brutal colonial project” (which seems to me to ignore the complexities of early Zionism) and in his apparent belief (pp. 209-210 and p. 274) that the BDS movement at this time did not include those who, like Corbyn, supported only a boycott of the Occupation, not of Israel within the ’67 borders.
But, despite all these problems, the book seems to me to be, taken as a whole, a very courageous exposé of a taboo subject. As I have said, Winstanley is never at all antisemitic. Like Hil Aked, he emphasises the weakness of the Israel Lobby, which has lost the moral argument in liberal public opinion. In my view, Winstanley over-emphasises the effectiveness of the Israel Lobby and Israeli interference in bringing down Corbyn; but this over-emphasis is not the result of antisemitism but of anti-Zionism. The difference between the two is very clear in this book; Winstanley is an extreme anti-Zionist without being in the least antisemitic. Weaponising Antisemitism is also a fascinating, fast-paced read – a political thriller narrating the real-life story of an extraordinary and appalling mass hysteria and scam.
Notes
[1] Diane Abbott and Corbyn ‘were lovers in the 1970s’: Left-wingers said to have had brief relationship after he split from his first wife. Daily Mail, 16 Sep 2015
[2] Disgraced Israeli agent Shai Masot attended minister’s secret London meeting, Elecronic Intifada, 8 Dec 2017
[3] “Friends of Israel” – a review, JVL 11 May 2023
[4] Lord Ashcroft: Tory pollster’s analysis of Labour defeat sparks internal debate, BBC, 11 Feb 2020
[5] Oliver Eagleton, The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, Verso Books 2022.
[6] Len McCluskey, Always Red, OR Books, New York, 2021, p. 240.
I don’t think Winstanley means that the Israel lobby engineered the election defeat but the extent of the ongoing antisemitism smear – 7 years and counting – against Corbyn and the left is hard to overestimate.
I agree with Deborah that a lot of the British right including the Labour right, JLM etc are quite capable of propagating the smear without Israel’s help but this is a symbiotic relationship with Zionism and Israel as well as being a perfect stick with which to beat the socialist left; it’s always been dual purpose, and as we know had its origins against Ed Miliband when he said he would recognise a Palestinian state.
Bear in mind also that the Labour party leadership not only are openly Zionist but the party also has a person employed as an Israel lobbyist sitting on the NEC – does anyone apart from me find this extraordinary?
There is no doubt that Corbyn and his entourage made some very serious blunders. One of these, in particular, was referred to in the book “The Starmer Project”.
Given that Starmer had twice tried to remove Corbyn as leader, he needed to be handled very carefully. Unfortunately, this did not happen and so he was put into a position where he was able to make his third attempt to bring Corbyn down. This time he succeeded.
The analogy here, which is very fitting, is that of President Nixon and General Alexander Haig. Haig’s real loyalty was not to Nixon but to the military chiefs who were very hostile. By making him his White House Chief of Staff, Nixon put Haig in the ideal position to destroy his presidency. And that is precisely what he did.
I’m really appreciating Deborha Maccoby’s acute analysis, I hope she’ll go on writing reviews for JVL.
I have not read the book yet so it is impossible to comment in detail on the review but a few points.
I agree that it is incorrect to say that the Israeli lobby BY ITSELF brought down Corbyn without also saying where that lobby gets its strength. If the Israeli lobby’s support for Israel ran counter to British foreign policy and NATO then it would be enfeebled. However that is not the case and that is the problem.
Yes the Board of Deputies is embedded in the British Establishment however it is quite legitimate to say that it is also part of the Israel lobby.
However Deborah is wrong to query Asa’s assertion that ‘Zionism has always been a brutal colonial project’. Zionism from its very beginning was, as Herzl explained to Cecil Rhodes in his Diaries just that.
How could it be any other? Zionist colonists went to Palestine from 1882 onwards with the intention of making it into a Jewish state eventually. That was the name of Herzl’s 1895 pamphlet. Like all settler colonists the Palestinians were invisible, hence Palestine was ‘A land without a people for a people without a land.’
The ‘complexities’ of early Zionism were about how Zionism could establish a base amongst diaspora Jews without alienating socialists and liberals. The non-statist Cultural Zionist strand of Ahad Ha’am involved a handful of intellectuals. It was never a serious force.
I haven’t read any of the books and memoirs mentioned (I have seen the Al-Jazeera programs), but Deborah Maccoby’s comments seem entirely reasonable. It would not have been possible for Israel to have caused Mr Corbyn’s downfall had not virtually the entire British establishment, including most of the Parliamentary Labour Party and all of the party machine, and the whole ‘main stream media’ been horrified by his election as Labour leader and the immense popularity and growing momentum (no reference to the organisation intended) of his progressive social-democratic programme.
But lsrael’s strong concern over the relatively strong pro-Palestinian movement in Britain went up an order or two of magnitude when Jeremy Corbyn, a patron of PSC and Stop the War, became Labour leader, and the Israeli foreign spokesperson, Mark Regev, was appointed Ambassador to London . A Coalition of all these forces with the Jewish Establishment was always going to be pretty strong and they weren’t going to play by any civilised rules.
Ms Maccoby is also correct about Ken Livingstone – the Haavara agreement can be presented as a way for the Yishuv (pre-state Zionist endeavour) to rescue Jews from the Nazis, which makes it an interesting footnote rather than the lynchpin of an argument against Zionism. Mr Livingstone’s repeated obsession with repeating it played badly, he should have closed it down and moved on.
I haven’t read Asa’s book and I’m afraid I don’t intend to but I have followed his every utterance for some years and continue to do so. This excellent review Deborah puts a finger on the reasons why one should be slightly sceptical about the the notion of a “very Israeli coup.” Not least because of a) Mike Pompeo’s statements about the importance of preventing Corbyn from taking office and b) the unified forces of the Labour right concentrated in the the PLP and certain trade unions. This Israeli state/embassy and the wider hasbara movement may well have played a role in the overthrow of Corbyn, socialism and the left, but it would be a mistake to grant it more than a supporting role in a campaign rooted in the US led imperialist empire, the British ruling class and their allies in the press, parliament – and deep within the Labour Party itself.
One day – when it’s far too late to matter – we’ll be able to tease out the various strands of the conspiracy against Labour and Corbyn. We’ll know which individuals and organisations drove it and the extent to which there was collaboration between them. We’ll also know how each of the “leading lights” were funded, when their funding first began and how much money was invested in the project. Until then, all we have are smidgeons of factual evidence within a vast mass of unknowns.
I think two aspects were critical to the project’s viability. The first was getting hold of substantial starter funding. The second was being able to put the scheme’s organisation and much of the workload through an already well-established close network of allies extending across the top echelons of the Labour party; disgruntled Labour donors; the media; and those with expertise in running computer-based disinformation, destabilisation and human targeting campaigns.
What would be interesting to find out is which principal suspects in the first conspiracy are equally prominent in Starmer’s rise (and in the rise of any replacements for Starmer).
I think Starmer’s credibility as a political leader is now fading fast amongst many different stakeholder groups; and those who put him in post will have to decide how they respond.
Starmer’s failure will be THEIR failure. Those who backed Owen Jones and Angela Eagle’s bids for leadership damaged their reputations for good sense. It seems likely Starmer’s backers will similarly loose their personal credibility.
Interesting. I have not read the book but some of the views that Maccoby criticizes struck me as accurate.
And to be clear: ‘A Very British Coup’, [both book and TV series], ends with a military coup; the sexual allegation is merely an occasion.
How do I get a hard copy of the book as it only seems to be on sale in the U.S.?
https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Asa-Winstanley/Weaponising-Anti-Semitism/27565534 from 30 May
There were too many cross currents and participants from very different areas of life in undermining Jeremy. Two sources seem to me to underly the desire to remove Jeremy Corbyn, These were Labour MPs who disliked him intensely – either because of his readiness to defy the whips or to take openly a principled stand on issues close to Labour values – and rich people who felt threatened by his readiness to increase taxes and increae the role of the state as regulator or business owner. I’d guess that some people in each group knew each other and reinforced in each other the need to do something about Jeremy Corbyn. Whether they alighted on anti semitism or it was suggested as an Achilles heel I suspect we will never know. The Party’s Head Office should have supported Jeremy against these attacks, but were already convinced that somewho he had to go. Jeremy was unused to leadership in a management role, and lacked the experience to handle the onslaught. I do wonder if Ed MIlliband had a similar experience without the allegations (as far as I know) of antisemitism. Finally you mever know what is said when you or a reliable witness are not there.
Puzzled that Maccoby says ‘Winstanley is never at all antisemitic’ – was she expecting one of the leading journalists on the left on Israel-Palestine to slip into antisemitism? Really? And then we have: “Winstanley is an extreme anti-Zionist without being in the least antisemitic.” What is an ‘extreme’ anti-Zionist?
I only very rarely occasionally go to bat for professional politicians – for one thing the nature of their career institutional being makes them imperfect and – they’re usually capable of sticking up for themselves. But it is hardly fair to suggest Livingstone should have bit his tongue.
He was merely citing Lenni Brenner’s ‘Zionism in the Age of the Dictators’ on the topic. And as Norman Finkelstein noted…
“Livingstone maybe wasn’t precise enough, and lacked nuance… Livingstone is more or less accurate about this – or, as accurate as might be expected from a politician speaking off the cuff”.
Clearly the Apartheid Israel lobby wants to occupy this ideological ground and prevent these type of histories being articulated. Livingstone was trying to keep this area of debate open.
On the question of who or what brought down Jeremy, Deborah asks, ‘The implication here is that it was the antisemitism smear campaign that was the main cause of Labour’s disastrous defeat in the 2019 General Election. Is this true?’ and Tony (Greenstein) responds, ‘I agree that it is incorrect to say that the Israeli lobby BY ITSELF brought down Corbyn without also saying where that lobby gets its strength.’ I agree with that but some members of that lobby at least do believe that they did it all by themselves.
In chapter 9, ‘Fallout’, Asa discusses that ghastly ‘Happy Chrismukah!’video by Joe Glasman from the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism. https://fb.watch/kLIfQO1oEO/ It’s an astonishing piece of work in which Corbyn is cast as Antiochus Epiphanes, the Greek Hellenistic king who persecuted Jews and forbade the practice of Judaism. Glasman continues the theme adding that ‘We defeated’ Corbyn just as the ancient Maccabees defeated Antiochus, and ‘We were free to be Jews again’, as if Jeremy had been some crazed Judeophobic genocidal maniac.
‘Kol hakovod’ (Well done! Respect!), he exclaims.
‘But Maccabees’, he concludes, ‘We did it, by word and deed, by protest and tweet, by our spies and intel, fab celebrities and our anonymous volunteers, by pleading, by rigorous research and gathering of evidence, by incredible video-making, by +interminable+ hours combing through tweets, by prayer, by dramatic speeches and street protests, by lorries carrying huge billboards, by writing and shouting and taking the mick out of the most humourless bunch of politics this country has ever made us suffer, by sheer bloodymindedness we metaphorically took the Temple back. Maccabees, at ease. They tried to kill us, we won. Let’s eat!’
Unless I’ve completely misheard the video, this is about what Jews, not Zionists, allegedly did. Or, allegedly, not merely what Zionists as Zionists, did, but — in this representation — what Zionists as Jews did, albeit with help from ‘our non-Jewish friends’. I fear greatly that if it was a ‘victory’ it may yet turn out to have been a pyrrhic one. No wonder, as Asa records, Glasman tried to have it removed from the internet.
Re Livingstone: Winstanley includes LIvingstone’s whole interview with Vanessa Feltz in an Appendix. Winstanley points out that it was Feltz who first mentioned Hitler; but Feltz did so by saying of Naz Shah: “She talked about what Hitler did being legal”. Shah was actually quoting Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: “We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal’. It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” King used these words about Hitler as an argument to justify the breaking of bad laws. This was a perfect opportunity for Livingstone to point this out (he was, after all, supposed to be defending Shah and calming down the row); but instead he uttered only the provocative non-sequitur “Hitler was supporting Zionism” — historically correct (even if it lacked nuance), but surely not the best choice of words for the occasion.
Winstanley seems to me to support the same kind of anti-Zionist position as that held by Tony Greenstein (who has also commented here). I disagree with this position (I think Tony and I will have to agree to differ on the nature of Zionism) but have a lot of respect for it; and in view of assertions by Zionists that this position is antisemitic, I think it’s important to point out that it isn’t at all antisemitic — quite the contrary. In view of articles like Tanya Gold’s JC review of Weaponising Antisemitism, and in view of the fact that Winstanley’s conclusions about Jewish/Israeli sabotage of Corbyn within Labour, though substantiated by evidence, do resonate with antisemitic “tropes” (which was why this topic was a taboo one), I do think it was necessary to say in my review that Winstanley throughout the book makes a clear distinction between Israel/Zionism and Jews.
The book is an impressive work of scholarship and I hope (with maybe naive optimism) that it will become a set text for media and politics students. I think that Winstanley is right to point to the Livingstone interview as a key moment, and that Deborah Maccoby is right to emphasise the unnecessarily provocative nature of Livingstone’s statement. Had he instead shown up the absurdity of wresting Naz Shah’s words out of their context of a quotation from MLK, he might have alerted many to this technique for fabricating false accusations at an early stage of the smear campaign. I wonder if, unlike Feltz’s researchers, he hadn’t spent hours trawling Shah’s social media posts and so was unaware of this one, failed to link it to the MLK quote, and made his factually accurate but flame-fanning comments about Hitler and Zionism as a deflection. A moment of poor judgement that has had untold costs.
Deborah and I will have to disagree about whether or not Zionism was born in original sin! It is my view that it was always a settler colonial project which after the First Aliyah 1882-1904). With the Second Aliyah (1904-1914) it became a racial supremacist under the Labour Zionists.
However it is worth pointing out that Zionism was originally a Christian idea as was the whole idea of the Jewish expulsion from Palestine (punishment for not accepting Chris as their saviour) and then their ‘Return’ (in order to facilitate the second coming etc .).
Clearly Livingstone could have chosen his words with more care and not called Palestine ‘Israel’ but the point Paul Seligman makes that Haavara agreement was a way for the Yishuv to rescue Jews from the Nazis is simply incorrect.
Ha’avara was central to the defeat of the Boycott movement and the stabilisation of the Nazi regime. This was collaboration of the worst kind.
That is why Ha’vara was not ‘an interesting footnote’ but indeed the lynchpin of the whole record of the Zionist movement during the Nazi era pre-1939.
Yfatt Weiss wrote that:
‘The Zionist movement found itself in a profound conflict between transfer and boycott and, in the broad sense, between the needs of the Yishuv and the sentiments of the Jewish people. [The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement]
Edwin Black, who wrote the definitive book on the Transfer Agreement wrote that after Ha’avara was agreed
‘the Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.’ (p.253, The Transfer Agreement)
This is no footnote. An international Jewish movement had effectively formed an alliance with the Hitler regime in defiance of the overwhelming majority of Jewish people
“This survey[4] found, as Winstanley himself points out (p. 253), that the antisemitism issue only came fifth among the factors cited by voters as reasons for why they did not vote Labour.”
I would dispute this assessment. That anti-semitism itself “only came fifth” does not disguise that media acceptance of JC’s antisemitism as fact, and given the intensity of near universal media criticism and denigration of Corbyn in time brought about a Pavlov’s dog reaction in the public whenever Corbyn’s name cropped up. My contention is that voters turned against JC as a result of being conditioned to do so without understanding why. I canvassed for JC including in 2019 and at that election reaction to my Labour rosette was often hostile but unable to give a reason. p.s. I’ll now read the rest of your article beyond the quote. I simply had to have my say on this point immediately.
I agree with this analysis, dated January 6, 2020, by Chelley Ryan. Her argument is: the December 2019 defeat was led by the Brexit issue. Corbyn’s betrayal of the Red Wall’s working class vote to Leave and move towards the liberal Establishment’s position of a second referendum (a move engineered by Starmer, whom she presciently warns against in this piece) was the main toxifying effect, which enabled other smears to take much more effect than they would have done otherwise. This was why the antisemitism smear and Corbyn’s personality became significant factors in the defeat – but the main underlying reason was still Brexit.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/reclaim-rebel-rep
“In this new Establishment context, all the smears against Corbyn took on a new twist. In 2017 they just added to his anti-Establishment appeal. Even the PLP coup probably added to it to a lesser extent. But by 2019, with Labour now firmly framed as an Establishment party, these smears only had a negative impact. Moreover, Jeremy’s reputation as a man of principle and serial rebel whose word was his bond, lay in tatters.”