Jewish Voice for Liberation and Anti-Zionism
On Sunday, September 28, a JVL members’ meeting made two significant decisions.
One is that we are changing the name of the organisation to Jewish Voice for Liberation (instead of Jewish Voice for Labour).
The second is that JVL will adopt an explicitly anti-Zionist position.
Our Statement of Principles now begins:
Jewish Voice for Liberation (JVL) is a Jewish-led organisation for members of the labour, trade union, socialist and progressive movements.
We are internationalist, anti-Zionist and anti-racist. We stand for rights and justice for Jewish people everywhere, and against wrongs and injustice to Palestinians and oppressed peoples anywhere. Our political priorities are universal human rights and dignity, justice for all, and freedom of expression.
We call out and fight all forms of racism including antisemitism, and oppose any hierarchy of racism including notions of Jewish exceptionalism.
JVL was founded in 2017 to defend Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership against false allegations of antisemitism intended to block its potential to form a genuinely progressive government. Our membership was drawn broadly from among the many Jewish left socialists and pro-Palestinian party activists, and non-Jewish supporters who shared our goals. Members had a range of political views. These included different perspectives on Zionism and on the origins of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
Since Starmer replaced Jeremy Corbyn in 2020 Labour has lurched to the right, shedding thousands of its leftwing adherents. Our change of name recognises the reality of Labour: a centre-right party no longer prioritising workers, the disadvantaged, civil liberties or international solidarity and in retreat from its climate commitments. Our new name speaks to our intention to work towards liberation from inequality and poverty in Britain; liberation from oppression in Palestine and globally; and liberation from the threats to the environment that confront us all.
Over the past two years most of our activities have focused on Israel’s ferocious response to the Hamas attack on Oct 7, 2023. The Israeli assault – indiscriminate and in overt breach of the tenets of the international law established in response to the nightmare of the Holocaust – has laid bare the racist basis of the Israeli state and the Zionist ideology that underpins it.
We can only see the Nakba, the 1948 displacement and mass expulsion of Palestinians, as intentional ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population by European settlers who happened to be Jews. The more loudly Western politicians mouth empty slogans about a “two state solution”, the clearer it becomes that they have no commitment to the establishment of a genuinely free and independent Palestinian state alongside a Jewish Israeli one, let alone the creation of a single democratic state with equal rights for all.
The racist basis of the Zionist project, privileging Jews over Palestinians of any religion, was there from the beginning. There was an early current of Zionist thought that favoured a genuinely binational state, but it never gained traction. And whatever some believe Zionism once had the potential to be, it is now irredeemably racist and imperialist, supremacist and exclusionary. This is made explicit on a daily basis in the violently racist language of genocidal Israeli government ministers. Israel is now a threat to Palestinians, to the region and to Jews world-wide if they continue to be, and to be seen as, a powerful network of support for Israel.
JVL’s decision to adopt an explicitly anti-Zionist position provides a clear basis for the organisation’s campaigning work. It strengthens our position as Jews arguing against the pernicious conflation, perpetuated by pro-Israel lobbyists, of Jewishness with Zionism and anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
It brings us into line with the anti-racist movement of which JVL has been part since its inception. Our sister organisations in the Global Jews for Palestine network have almost all evolved towards an avowedly anti-Zionist position over recent years, led by the largest and most influential, Jewish Voice for Peace in the US. The change will also bring us into closer alignment with the many Palestinian organisations we work with and support.
In our daily practice, JVL will publish material explaining and debating this position. Our public statements will reflect it. When we address meetings, rallies and demonstrations, we will make clear our opposition not just to the crimes and atrocities Israel commits but also to the racist ideas and imperialist ambitions inherent in an ethnocentric, settler-colonial state.
Of course we recognise that there are some, especially critical Israeli voices but others as well, who share our broad analysis of where we are today but may be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-Zionist. They will continue to be welcome as members of JVL.
As an anti-Zionist Jewish organisation standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we will work to resist their oppression with all those who share the goal of liberation and equality for all between the river and the sea.
JVL should get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Congratulations. This is most welcome & not before time!
A superb statement. I am moved and heartened by your clarity, coherence, ethical commitment, and stamina. Every word. Shame on this Starmerite government and the hypocrisy of its stubborn complicity in genocide, in the face of such overwhelming evidence. He meant it, Starmer: ‘I support Zionism without qualification’.
THANK YOU.
JVL and the JVL community go some way towards rebuilding my (shattered) belief in human decency. We have many different, probably contradictory opinions on the right way forward. What matters more, I think, is the commitment we share for ending suffering, seeking justice and creating sustainable peace.
That commitment has been active and practical (eg conscientiously taking part in the many marches for peace). It’s been hugely brave and self-sacrificing (as when JVL members and others risked long prison sentences to stand up for civil rights). It’s involved so many of us thinking intensely about what skills and time we can offer and then “gifting” these, hoping to end the carnage in Gaza and give Israel and Palestine futures worth having.
my comment is: why do I never see any Comments on these JVL posts?
I would like to join.
You are very welcome to sign up using this link – https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/join-jvl/.
What a joke you guys have become. Jews ?? really?? haha Goodbye. Am Yisrael Chai FOREVER, sorry to tell you. Your ilk will rot in your hatred of your fellow Jews FOREVER.
Yet again Jaye you can’t see the wood for the trees, …these comments are for the love of Jews and the Jewish faith…yours are for Zionism and its intent to replace Judaism by its political intentions of colonialism and the formation of a ‘Greater Israel’
I think one has to distinguish between what Zionism has become and what Zionism could be. It seems to me unfair to characterize Zionism simply as what it has become. The statement refers to an early current of Zionist thought which is now dismissed because current policies and conditions don’t reflect that, so you essentially are redefining “Zionism” to not allow a “Zionism” which is not racist and exclusionary. That redefinition is what allows you to be unapologetically “anti-Zionist”. I think that’s unfair to those who believe that Jews after the Holocaust were entitled to a homeland, recognizing that a Jewish homeland is not the same as a Jewish state, with all the adverse aspects that have become all too clear over the years and decades.
Eric Simon is mistaken. Zionism was a reactionary answer to anti-Semitism from the beginning. It accepted the anti-Semitic postulate that Jews did not belong where they were.
It was also anti-socialist and anti-communist from the beginning and was described by the Bund as the main enemy of the Jewish working class for its collaboration with the Czarist regime.
The Cultural Zionists such as Ahad Ha’am were always a tiny minority. It was accepted by nearly all Zionists that a future Jewish state would be a ‘portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.’ [Herzl, the Jewish State]
As early as 1891 Ahad Ha’am was writing in Truth from Eretz Yisrael about the about how the early Zionist settlers ‘behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it’.
With the advent of the second aliyah in 1904 these became entrenched in Jewish Labour, Land and Produce policies which foreshadowed the Apartheid state’s practices.
Zionism was always about a Jewish state not a Jewish homeland. Herzl’s founding pamphlet Der Judenstaat (the State of the Jews) made that explicit.
My one major disagreement with JVL’s statement is that Israel was not established in response to the Holocaust. It was established as a European settler colony and during the Holocaust Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership were at pains to stress that their priority was building a Jewish state not rescuing the Jewish refugees from Nazi occupation and extermination.
Well done.
I still think identifying as Jewish for the purpose of combating the antisemitism smear is counter-productive because the response lies in socialist politics that all on the left can get behind – it has never been about antisemitism, and, as we’ve seen, some outspoken Jewish leftists have then been subjected to appalling abuse and I feel we’ve not been united enough on the left to have strength in numbers.
Zionism of course is behind much of the smear, alongside imperialist backing for client states in the Middle East. But it is also political.
Where Jewish politics that pertained to a cultural/religious group was so important was in the rejection of Zionism; the critical situation we face now is national popularism and the call from the right that other groups don’t belong here.
And also, increasing numbers of Jewish figures are saying that Israel doesn’t practise Jewish (aka human) values and is a sham ‘Jewish state’.
Combating Zionism also means combating ethno-nationalism elsewhere, and all angles – Jewish and not – should be explored and united, not separated.
Response to your comment, Marc: ‘I still think identifying as Jewish for the purpose of combating the antisemitism smear is counter-productive because the response lies in socialist politics…’
The problem with this comment is that it comes from a position that wants to deny the lived experience of a group of people or, more accurately, groups of people. As it stands, there are millions of people known as Jews, and/or who call themselves Jews. Some of these millions do not identify with Israel (which possibly makes them ‘non-Zionists’) and some of these millions want to say that they are against Zionism (and that can be for a variety of reasons). My question to you is why should such Jews deny whatever aspects of Jewishness that they possess and live with and through? What possible purpose can it serve in itself, or more particularly, as you’ve thrown down the challenge, how would renouncing or forgoing being Jewish, help build socialism? What kind of progress towards socialism is it that asks of people to leave their identity/culture/heritage/tradition/religion at the door first? What other groups/cultures/nationalities/self-defined identities would you ask that of?
Response to Michael Rosen:
I didn’t say anything about denying identity or renouncing being Jewish; I just don’t feel that it has got us anywhere in this particular struggle to organise separately as Jews.
I guess I’m in the camp of a socialist who happens to be Jewish – the latter does indeed bring life experiences but it isn’t very helpful politically in the current Islamophobic climate. Where it is possibly becoming helpful is in the US, where an increasing number of younger Jews are polling as less interested in Israel.
I know also that there are Jewish groups in the US trying to fight Trump’s university clampdown. Your own group at Goldsmiths could perhaps benefit from the scale of non-Jewish activists.
Interesting I feel are the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and our Green leader, Zack Polanski. One Muslim, one Jewish – socialist, anti-racist politics is what is setting them apart from tired mainstream politicians, but their identity is also important to them.
Thank you for this – I believe that for most aspects of trying to make the world a better place our Jewish heritage is irrelevant but for campaigning on Palestine and for addressing the weaponisation of antisemitism and also, in practice, relegating anti Black racism and Islamophopbia lower down in a hierarchy of racism, it does matter. It is also clear to me that while antisemitic attitudes and also actions, such as the attack on the synagogue i Manchester, continue to exist, the state demonstrates its racism through such things as the Prevent programme which overwhelmingly targets Muslims and Black people, for example through the levels of incarceration, stop and search as well as sentencing. I certainly believe that we need to speak as Jews, along with everyone else, on these issues.