I was in a Zoom meeting organized by the UK Socialist Website Left Horizons with some folks in the UK yesterday who were discussing the witch hunt that has been ongoing on with regards to alleged Anti-Semitisim in the British Labor Party. Folks following events there are aware of the incredible media attempts to slander Jeremy Corbyn during his time as party leader. No British politician has faced such a barrage of assaults by the right wing capitalist media as Corbyn. The right wing are demanding he apologize for comments he made with regard to alleged Anti-Semitism in the party and that he has supported Palestinian rights. Regardless of what one might thing about Corbyn, his failings, him not being tough enough and such, he should be defended from this assault.
From what I gather, there are suspensions and expulsions of members that defend him. Here in the US anyone that criticizes Israel or Zionism can be accused of Anti-Semitism. The important thing to remember here is that it is Christian Zionists, not Jewish ones, that are more numerous and more vociferous in their support for Zionism and this brutal regime. Christian Zionists are driven by a view that the developments in the Middle East are a result of texts written a few thousand years ago by people who thought the world was flat.
Opposing Israeli policy or Zionism is not Anti-Semitism. The support for Israel by US and western imperialism has nothing to do with any love the Gentile capitalist class has for their Jewish competitors and everything to do with having a reliable foothold and ally in the Middle East as a means to maintain plunder of the regions resources and keep a strategic political and military base. There is no population more reliable as a tool of a greater power that protect them than the population of colonial settler states.
A very articulate and, honestly, deeply concerning discussion of how the charge of "antisemitism" is being weaponized to discredit the left. It makes me think of Leon Rosselson's insightful and probing song, "My Father's Jewish World," in which he describes his father, a Jewish immigrant from Tsarist Russia, who became "an atheist, and then, with pride, a Communist until the day he died." and then Rosselson wonders what his father's legacy has been to him: "The state of always being an outsider, of asking why and asking why again." He cannot identify with "the state that says it's Jewish, carved from stolen land, brings only shame by torturing and killing in our name," and finally concludes that there is a "precious strand of Jewishness that challenges authority and dares to stand against the powers that be." I am proud to be "the wrong kind of Jew," if that's what the wrong kind of Jew is.
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