Antisemitism, Israel, Chris Williamson, and the unification of all peoples.

It is impossible for me to not in some way be bias. Any article, any statement,
any idea, is susceptible to the bias of its source. So, I want to be clear, that I am
not giving you answers. Nobody can give you answers, but we can all help
guide each other to finding our own answers. What I’m doing today is just
providing you a lens to look through. But I hope, that with my research and
lived of this topic, it is a somewhat comprehensive lens. Likewise, it’s
important to acknowledge that there is simply too much context to this
situation to provide it all in a short text like this, so I’ve had to be selective in
the information I present to you, which of course means that I will have
excluded some information that others would argue is more important than
what I have included. But there is nothing I can do about that. And a last thing
before we get into it, I think it’s also important, since I am providing for you,
that you understand I’m coming from, the shade of my lens, if you will. So,
who am I? Both of my maternal grandparents were among the 600,000 Jews
who lived in Israel upon its establishment, having fled eastern and central
Europe. I am Jewish, but non-religious. And I am a Libertarian Socialist. I have
been elected to represent the Liberal Jewish Youth Movement on the board of
Deputies, I’m a committed Labour activist, I am an Activism Fellow of the
Jewish Council of Racial Equality. I believe in the abolition of nations and the
removal of all border control. And so, I believe that *everyone* has a right to
live wherever they may so wish, and If they choose to live in Israel-Palestine,
whatever their identity, so be it. It’s not a contradictory nor antisemitic view. It
is simply the belief that nationalism is the among the primary barriers to world
peace and the very existence of nations is counterproductive to freedom.

Anti, of course, means against, we, as Labour, are anti-fascist. We oppose

fascism. I hope. Now Semite, of Semitism, does not actually mean Jew, Semite,
is a biblical term that refers to anyone who speaks the Semitic languages,
which include Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopian sub-languages, Maltese and dozens of
others, with well over 300 million speakers globally. So the 14.5 million or so
Jews in the world make up but a fraction of the Semitic people and
antisemitism is an inaccurate word, but that is language. It’s just important to

be aware that Semite is not synonymous with Jew. Antisemite however, by

definition, exclusively refers to someone who is racist to Jews.

Why is this? In the mid-1800s Eugenics were all the rage in Europe, From
Britain, to Austria, to Russia. Jews specifically, among other targeted
minorities, were scapegoated as being a liability to society, whether as
financial goblins, or rodent-like pests, and there was a significant portion of
European society which was susceptible to these ideas, just as many still are
today. As these tensions simmered in the European consciousness, many
people looked for ways to scientifically analyse this Jewish scourge, as they
saw it, many books and pamphlets were published which looked to define Jew-
hate, or Judenhass in German, in scientific terms, to totally legitimise anti-
Jewish racism with Victorian-era science. And its here that we see the first use
of the word anti-Semitism to specially refer to combatting the alleged threat
that Jews posed. In 1880 the league of anti-Semites was founded in Germany,
advocating the forced expulsion of Jews. This culture inspired the infamous
book “the protocols of the elders of Zion”. This text, published in Russia in
1903, detailed the totally bullshit plan for Jewish world domination. If you ever
wonder where all the Rothschild, Zionist puppet master, Jewish control,
conspiracy theories come from, it’s this book. And the book worked. Over 100
years later the ideas that it fabricated are still floating around in the
consciousness of society.

However, Jew-hate started well, well before the protocols were published. The
Jewish history is one of oppression, and that is not to say that Jews have not, in
a huge range of times and places, lived perfectly peacefully in multicultural
societies. But just to brush over a few examples, we were enslaved by the
Egyptians, Judaism was outlawed by the Greeks, Hadrian, famous for his wall,
is described as seemingly desiring to “annihilate” the Jewish people. Christians
have targeted us on and off for their entire existence, expulsions, massacres,
forced conversions. The British are in no way innocent. There are hundreds of
examples of hate crime against Jews in Britain. 150 Jews were burnt to death
in York in 1190, we were expelled from basically everywhere in western
Europe again and again in the middle ages. Most of you will be familiar with
the yellow stars which Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis to signify their
Judaism, what many of you won’t know is that this was not at all an original
idea. In fact, this was an idea of the popes. In 1121. 100,000 Jews forced out of
France thousands out of Austria, Spain in the 1400s as good as outlawed
Judaism and repossessed Jewish belongings. What was ours became theirs.
During plagues, of course we were blamed. Hundreds of Jewish communities
were annihilated, Strasbourg, free from plague, saw 900 Jews burnt alive for
the crime of being Jewish. I came across a 16th century painting of a German
Jew and do you know what he was painted with? A bag of money and a yellow
star. The Russian pogroms, violent anti-Jewish rioting, inspired by the emperor
and later the soviet leaders, saw thousands of Jews attempting to flee the
Russian territories, and of course, Britain, being the bastion of acceptance and
tolerance, drafted the first ever anti-immigration bill in Europe (1905),
specifically targeting Jews fleeing oppression, looking for refuge on our shores.
Antisemitism was not a minority view, it was the view of the British
government that our country would be better off, without my people. The
justifications ranged from, Jews murdered Jesus, to we eat babies, to we carry
the plague, to Zionism is a manifestation of the protocols and is attempting to
take over the world. These ideas, referred to as tropes, are ancient and
modern, as long as we have existed, so have they.

So for Jews, when we see something which looks a bit like one of the classic
examples of antisemitism, and there are many, it is coded within us to be
fearful, and life is such that these pop up all the time. When someone likes a
post on Facebook which includes an antisemitic trope, we cannot immediately
say whether that is part of a deeper held view on their behalf that Jews are an
“other”, we can only judge from their prolonged behaviour whether they are
an ally, an enabler, or someone who is actively trying to hurt us.

This is how insecure societies work. An “other” is created, whether it is one

people or all who are not a particular people, to explain to the “desirable”
people why they have suffered. I have a friend who honestly believed that the
Protocols were real, that it was factual. He did not hate Jews as a people, he
even ran the Israel society at his uni and studied Hebrew, he just believed in a
Jewish conspiracy of world domination. As he matured, he began to
understand that that is not true, but for a long time it formed a simple
framework to explain the world. Now he volunteers in a synagogue and he
knows better, but it highlighted to me how ideas spread and how susceptible
we all are, all of us, to believing baseless lies. This friend happened to be
Muslim and I found his perspective very interesting. he explained to me how
the global oppression of Muslims and normalisation of islamophobia, Trump,
Johnson, just to give the most profound examples, feeds antisemitic
conspiracies. These theories are so powerful and have survived for so long
because they are simple, easy answers to complex questions. The belief being
that “Of course Muslims are being oppressed, Jews are in charge and they look
down on us”. In his view, we’re all being duped. Antisemitism, like all racism, is
just an idea. You can expel all the racists you want, but that will not remove
the ideas. The only solution is education.

So when a Jew says, “hey, I think we should have some land just for us so that
we can look after ourselves”. It is unarguably a justified desire. Of course, an
ethno-state, a country for one kind of people, is by definition racist. But as long
you’re not being violent: oppressing or displacing, I can see no issue with
having areas of land which are dedicated to one people if they so wish. Zionism
is the aspiration for a safe space for Jewish people. Palestine was chosen
because it is the biblical promised land, Judaism has a rich history in the area,
the British didn’t want the Jews coming to Britain after world war 1 and the
Palestinian people were seen as barbarians, so a “national home for the Jewish
people in Palestine” was promised to the pioneers of Zionism, who at the time
made up a minority of Jews, mostly secular. After world war 2 the need for a
Jewish homeland became even more obvious, and so the British carried
through their promise and began to establish the state of Israel to occupy
much of British Palestine. Israel was established because of antisemitism.
Because Jews feared for their safety and unfortunately 700,000 Palestinians,
about half the population, were expelled from the land they had lived on for
generations. Therefore, Israel’s creation, objectively, is a crime against the
Palestinian people. And I am yet to think of or come across a justification for
the manner in which Israel was formed, or the way it has acted since, which is
both honest and considers Palestinian human rights. There are people on both
sides who wish the other to be obliterated. Hamas have called for the
destruction of Israel, the Israeli education minister this month all but admitted
that his vision for Israel includes the west bank and functions as an apartheid
state. The answer cannot be to appease people who are calling for violence,
but to find a way around it.

Antisemitism, like all prejudice, exists within society, and as a slice of society,
also within the Labour party, therefore, labour has an antisemitism problem.
It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter how much less racist we are than
everyone else. Racism exists, therefore there is work to be done. The identity
of anti-racist only means something when coupled with intersectionality, the
acknowledgement that all prejudice, homophobia, transphobia, racism,
sexism, ableism and so on, is inherently linked, and intersectionality requires
an open mind, willingness to accept new ideas. The acceptance that the views
we hold can be wrong.

But what we are seeing now is a muddying of the definition of racism and in
this example antisemitism, to include not just malicious behaviour towards
Jews, but careless behaviour. Chris Williamson is the prime example. He has
defended antisemites. Used extremely careless language in speaking about
Antisemitism and shown time and time again that he is more interested in
pushing his politics than taking care to create a welcome environment for
Jews, two aims which should go hand in hand anyway, as a socialist. This is a
worrying pattern of behaviour and certainly inappropriate for an MP, but I am
as yet undecided on whether he can qualify as an anti-Semite. I feel that he is
not listening and not learning, but to call him an out and out racist minimises
the gravity of the word. As a socialist one should always be conscious of social
issues. It is not tolerable that Williamson is acting in a way that inflames jews
of all political persuasions to such an extent. I’ve asked many people about
Chris Williamson and the pattern I’ve noticed is repeated for many other
subjects too. There is no objective deciding factor that he is an anti-Semite, but
there’s none that he’s not either. I believe that his continuous bias can qualify
as a from of antisemitism, but some days I find myself leaning towards thinking
that he’s just passionate, but extremely obnoxious. Either way, I cannot say
that his repeat offences and repeated disregard for Jewish sensitivities are not
extremely worrying.

Of course, some still support him, or at least, reject his suspension on the
grounds that the speech he was suspended for has been misinterpreted and
misrepresented. And they’re not totally wrong, much of the coverage has been
ignorant to say the least, that’s just the state of British Journalism right now,
and to an extent, its Williamsons fault. He unnecessarily opened himself to
these attacks. Williamson and his supporters justify his actions by arguing that
he is the only person pushing back against the establishment smears against
the left, and again they’re kinda right. He is one of a very small number of
prominent people who attempt to articulate the sustained assault on
socialism, through deceitful, bad faith attacks by Liberal and conservative
politicians and journalists, among many others. He came to the defence of
victims of smears like Marc Wadsworth and Jackie walker, who I’ll come back
to later. But that is not an excuse for his misconduct. Like so many, Williamson
was careless in his language because he is human. His judgment is clouded and
he is unmindful. He tweeted and later apologised for support for Gilad Atzmon,
a Hitler fan. He recognised that he was wrong to support Atzmon but my
question is what prompted him in the first place? Did He just see someone
accused of anti-Semitism and leap to their defence without the slightest
research? Or does he have friends who are sympathetic to Gilad? Either way,
Williamson is clearly more interested in being seen to be fighting for a very
narrow politic, than he is in not supporting anti-Semites. He replied to an
article about allegations of Antisemitism at Oxford uni, with a video of the
Israeli army abusing a Palestinian man. It doesn’t matter whether you think the
accusations were true, or not, it is terrifying for Jews to see people seemingly
conflating Judaism with Zionist violence, and it’s offensive and upsetting to
dismiss allegations of racism by deflecting. He made silly mistake after silly
mistake because he was so driven by his desire, justly, to challenge Israel and
protect the left from what he sees as smears, that it blinded him to his socialist
sensibilities. He has shown no real sign that he is attempting to change.

But it’s the same story we see repeated time and time again with antizionist
campaigners.

A simplified example, Asa Winstanely was among the prominent critics of Israel
on the left. He did work uncovering Israeli interference in British politics. Of
course, sometimes he slipped into exaggeration and bias but that’s only
human, I don’t think anyone can say they haven’t done the same. Of course, he
received a lot of flak from pro-israeli sources, and some jews on the left had
had enough of the conspiratorial nature of it, but there was enough truth in
most of his writing. That is, until Corbyn came in and spooked the
establishment. That triggered the renovation if the decaying Paole Zion, the
Jewish affiliate of Labour, as the Jewish Labour movement, with the sole
express intention of promoting Zionism, out of fear that Corbyn’s pro-
palestinian activism poses a threat to Israel’s existence. But Asa Winstanley's
obsession with the Israeli lobby and its links to JLM proved to be his downfall.
In the last three years he has become more and more hysterical in the
language he uses about Israel and the established Jewish institutions and it
resulted in him claiming that JLM are a “proxy” for the Israeli embassy because
a couple people who once worked for the embassy are now connected to JLM.
It’s information that’s worth noting but “two people who were involved in
Jewish politics are still involved in Jewish politics” does not a conspiracy make.

As we’ve discussed, Most jews are understandably very sensitive to anything

which resembles a classic trope and claiming Israel controls the British Jewish
institutions definitely resembles a trope. This inherent sensitivity means that
when criticising Israel, or really just speaking on anything to do with Jews, you
have to be sensitive and nuanced. If not for the jews who will be scared by
your lack of nuance, then do it for yourself so that you don’t get labelled as an
antisemite. Not doing so doesn’t automatically make you a racist, but it does
make you an asshole and you have no right to be annoyed when someone
accuses you of antisemitism.

Jackie Walker. Once a momentum vice-chair, now, seen by some as a victim of

a smear campaign and by others as a hardcore anti-Semite. The allegations
against her have certainly been exaggerated and distorted, but she is also in no
way innocent. You’ll surely remember when Ken Livingston was expelled for
claiming Zionists had continuously collaborated with Nazis, a gross
misrepresentation of the actual events, Jackie walker said: “At a crucial point in
history, when the Nazis might have been toppled, [Zionist Jews in Germany]
decided to enter an agreement with Hitler. Now, you may decide it was all
worth it to save a number of lives and establish Israel, or you may say it was a
betrayal which helped enable the Nazi regime to take hold with all the
subsequent consequences”. You simply cannot accuse Jews of causing the
holocaust. You cannot do that, and if you’re going to make claims like that, you
bloody well have to evidence it. She said she was citing a book but she didn’t
even mention what it was called or who it was by. Its for that reason, among
many other deeply insensitive things that Jackie walker has said, it became
totally inappropriate for her to continue as a labour member, let alone
momentum chief. But Chris Williamson championed her defence, and then
acted all surprised when everyone turned on him.

Antisemitism exists within labour. There is a tiny portion of people within the
party, who genuinely hold racist views, and this is what the disciplinary process
is for. When we see something that doesn’t look right we report. Just like on
the tube, See it say it, sorted. Critics say that it is the disciplinary process itself
which is flawed. Some are calling for an independent process that does not
include labour staff, others argue that the problem is not the labour processes,
but Corbyn and his team. Others (me) say that no process and no man is
perfect and while it is crucial that we have an efficient and effective
disciplinary process, the thing that Labour needs most is education. The only
thing that almost everyone agrees on, is that there is a toxic environment
within the party pertaining to Jews and Israel. The issue is not actually the anti-
Semites so much as it is the culture of denial that a problem exists. I have been
conducive to this culture. For a good while I simply didn’t see what the
problem was. Of course, I accepted antisemitism exists within the party. I’ve
been targeted. But I did not see how that connected to the baseless smears
that I saw against Corbyn and it took months of me educating myself to finally
begin to form a comprehensive understanding of what the reality was. I came
to terms with the fact that nobody is quite right. Everyone’s argument is in
some way flawed. There is not one person who has all the answers. I listened
to everyone. People I loved and people I loathed, and it brought me to the
conclusion, that this is all because of the ongoing situation in Israel-Palestine.

On the Israel-Palestine question, I see echoes of my grandfather in Corbyn. A

quote of his I will never forget “Always with the oppressed”. We must stand in
solidarity with the oppressed, but we must also acknowledge that the answer
can’t be to dismiss any group of people as simply wrong. We must accept that
both Israelis and Palestinians and everyone else has a right to live wherever
they wish. The answer is not to pick sides, but to unite them.
Unfortunately, many Jews, and Palestinians too, see Israel-Palestine as
rightfully theirs. It is an issue of the right to self-determination, nothing is more
emotive. Many people argue that denying Israel the right to exist is antisemitic.
It can be, if you deny Jewish people the right to self-determination, but it is not
contradictory to support the right of both Jews and Palestinians to live freely
on Israel-Palestine while also maintaining that an ethno-state, of any kind, is
discriminatory. Let everyone live where they wish. The aim is peace, so we do
not settle for less. I understand why this may be seen as idealistic, but the
alternative is to believe that peace is not possible, and I refuse to do that.

I think that there is one thing that everyone can do which go lengths to end
this mess. if you make a claim, whether you are accusing Israel of being an
apartheid state or accusing Jeremy Corbyn of being an anti-Semite. Evidence it.
Craft a logical argument, just as I have tried to do today. Support your claims
with a structure of thought. That is all. You cannot credibly be accused of
antisemitism if you are able to immediately supply irrefutable evidence for
your accusations. You cannot be called a smear merchant if you have rock solid
evidence to support your claims. It requires a lot of effort to navigate through
the Israel-Palestine discussion, but Jews are not looking to accuse everyone
around them of being an anti-Semite, it’s really quite stressful for us, we’re just
trying to make as much noise as we can when we see something that threatens
us. If you are articulate and evidence based, you will not just be fine, but
people will listen to you, because it will be clear to those who might have
otherwise seen antisemitism in your words, that you are in fact just looking for
peace.

Whether it is deliberately used to scapegoat a people, as the Nazis and

Russians did, or if it’s just blissful ignorance as my friend was victim to, racism
keeps people busy fighting each other, preventing us from uniting against our
common enemy. Whether you see that as the wrong party in government, or
the entire political-economic establishment, it is prejudice which holds us back
from replacing it with a system that works for the many, not the few.