Anti-Semitism is anti-Palestine

Look, I'm an anti-Zionist. I oppose the State of Israel, as I oppose in general the idea of a state being set apart exclusively for one ethno-religious group as racist. I support a secular one-state solution, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the peaceful co-existence of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Palestine. I am, I take it, in no danger of confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

But, to say that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism is not to deny the reality of anti-Semitism. And the sad fact is that some anti-Semites have attached themselves, like the racist parasites they are, to the pro-Palestine movement here and elsewhere. Sometimes the language of anti-Zionism gets appropriated, as with this delightful character, going on about "The Zionists, the Illuminati and Mr Rothschild himself, and the illegitimate child of Adolf Hitler!":




Other manifestations of anti-Semitism I've witnessed include:

• Placards featuring stars of David, sometimes in association with swastikas.
• Holocaust references.
• Use of the phrase 'the Jews', when referring to the State of Israel, as in 'the Jews forced the Palestinians out of their homes'. Often this co-exists with classical anti-Semitic tropes such as bloodthirstiness or acquisitiveness.
• A particular insistence that Jewish people condemn the actions of Israel more exacting than any similar insistence directed at the population in general.

These are all in and of themselves unacceptable, and deserve outright condemnation as racism. People saying and doing these kind of things should not be welcome on pro-Palestine demonstrations, and we should have the courage to confront them in the same way we would any other kind of racist. And that involves everything usually implied by the slogan 'no platform'.

Because not only are these things vile in their own right. They actively work against the Palestinian cause, providing a propaganda coup for Israel's explicit supporters as well as for those whose less honest and direct positions are effectively pro-Israeli (I have one well-known ultra-left sect in mind; I shall not give them publicity). It divides our movement and plays straight into the hands of those who would have us believe that diversity will always give rise to hostility.

Selling Labour versus Being Labour

Over the weekend I had an altercation on Twitter with a man in his twenties who seemed to hold me personally responsible for the actions of the Blair governments. "How can you condemn what's going on in Gaza - you gave us Iraq?". I am, the argument seemed to be, a member of the Labour Party. And Labour was responsible for Iraq. Therefore I was responsible for Iraq. Bastard.

What I find interesting about these kind of debates, and I have a lot of them (generally with activists younger than myself), is that they quickly reach an impasse. I say things like, "I was utterly opposed to Iraq. I am on the Left of the Labour Party, and oppose the leadership on many things. Within the Party I vote, argue, and organise against the kind of things you - left-wing activist - dislike". And my interlocutor says things like, "No, you're wrong. Labour supported the Iraq war. So if you're in Labour, you must support it. Otherwise you should leave."

The problem here is that two basically different conceptions of political parties are going head-to-head. I believe that an electoral party like Labour is a coalition of interests, a movement and a site of struggle. To be sure, it is one in which the Left is at an historically low point, but that doesn't alter the fact that what Labour is, or stands for, is constantly contested - and not in a vacuum, but within the broader setting of the labour movement and Labour's electoral base. Against me is posed a passive, consumerist, version of electoral politics. Political parties are brands; I pick the one that suits me (my lifestyle, my values, my economic interests) most exactly, perhaps after perusing a few manifestos. If I'm very enthusiastic, a brand junkie, I might even join a party. My role within the Party, on the current model, is as an electoral footsoldier, a volunteer. Labour and its policy are just there, prior to and independent of me. My role is to sell them to a wider public.

One of Tony Blair's crowning achievements was to popularise the consumerist model of politics, and to partially restructure Labour on the basis of it. A generation of left-wing activists has unconsciously taken it on board. It is entirely pointless for the Labour Left to attempt recruitment to the Party from among activists of this sort unless we are prepared to address, and argue against, basic assumptions about the nature of party politics itself.

Friday Video Corner

Thanks to Rhian for making me aware of this.

Stop it, again

Right, here's the thing. The Russian government is really quite shit. To be specific, it is a homophobic shower of authoritarians serving a particularly brutal and oligarchic imposition of neoliberalism combined with an expansionist imperialism. This is Not Good.

It is not the kind of thing socialists should support. Really.

Said government is up to its neck in support for separatists in Ukraine, who almost certainly shot down an airliner causing massive loss of innocent life.

All of this is true. It is not some kind of imperialist lie. And, really, the combination of residual Stalinism and conspiracy theory wingnuttery on elements of the British Left that makes people claim otherwise both impedes our ability to understand the world properly and makes all of us look bonkers.

Stop it. Now.

(If you want more productive politics from the region, please do look at Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity).
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And here's another thing. Yes, obviously, Palestinians have a right to armed struggle. Tonnes of people have said that. But David Ward:

(a) is a Liberal Democrat MP. Enough said.
(b) has said clearly anti-Semitic things in the past. This provides the context to some of the reaction to him today.

Palestine needs friends. But it really doesn't need every friend that offers themself. Beware the thought that my enemy's enemy is my friend. Sometimes my enemy's enemy is simply a muppet

Iraqi Christians

As if the past few days didn't contain their fair share of human misery, the accounts coming out of Iraq about the treatment of Christians at the hands of ISIS are harrowing in the extreme. I urge you to read Tim Stanley's account here, lightly inflected though it may be with problematic politics.

One paragraph mid-way through the piece merits attention here:

Yet, having been so intimately involved in the collapse of Iraq, the West is now bizarrely silent about events in Mosul. The streets of London fill with thousands marching against Israel’s military operation in Gaza; the West rails mightily against the Russian separatists in Ukraine. But of Iraq there is nothing. Why?

Unlike Stanley I don't think there is any such thing as 'the West' which has raged against Israel and the Moscow-aligned separatists. On the contrary, the rulers of some Western countries have focused on the latter, some (but not all by any distance) of the ruled on the former. Nevertheless, there is a fair question to be asked of the Left. What have we to say about the persecution of Christians by groups like ISIS? More pointedly, the question could be rephrased: why the silence?

Now, I think the silence has been well-motivated. Any case of Christians suffering at the hands of Muslims is, in the current climate, ripe for appropriation by the Islamophobic Right in the cause of a warmed-over clash-of-civilisations narrative. This whole area is made difficult by the fact that plenty of concern for persecuted Christians, and not a few agencies devoted to their relief, are tainted with this politics. The Barnabas Fund is an example of one British group this blogger would not touch with a bargepole.

It is tempting to think, therefore, that political discourse in this area is polluted beyond the possibility of emancipatory use. This is a temptation, however, and one to which we shouldn't succumb - it is an admission of intellectual defeat, and much more importantly a cowardly abandonment of innocent victims. Another reason for silence is more sophisticated: we make noise about Gaza because, as citizens of imperialist States closely aligned to Israel, our own ruling class is directly complicit in the attrocities there in a way they are not in ISIS. This strategy is compatible with the recognition of an indirect complicity in the actions of ISIS, which were - after all - a foreseeable probable outcome of the war in Iraq.

On this second point: the differing political relations between Western ruling classes and Israel, on the one hand, and ISIS on the other, constitute good reasons to treat the two cases differently. They are no reason to ignore the plight of Iraqi Christians altogether. There are things we can say about their situation. We can, for example, make the connection between ISIS and the Iraq war explicit (there are more intriguing questions to be asked about Western support for ISIS' antecedents as well). We can actually condemn ISIS - it is amazing how this is a somewhat controversial position in some radical quarters. If there are ways of expressing solidarity with the victims of religious oppression and violence in Iraq, we should make use of them (and this is something I need to explore). The time will come, I fear,  when we are supporting some of these people against the UK asylum and immigration system. Perhaps the biggest debt we owe, though, to suffering humanity is not to forget it. Thus far, we have failed.

More of the same

Ed Balls

And so, Labour's National Policy Forum votes in favour of a future Labour government sticking to Tory austerity spending limits, promising instead of increased spending a lukewarm brew of structural reform and 'redistribution of power and opportunity'. The thought that power and opportunity tend to follow money seems not to have occurred. The constraints this self-limitation will put on policy wiggle room might, of course, mean that 'future Labour government' has for the time being the ring of 'future World Cup winning England team'. There has to be a risk that, posed with a choice between two versions of the Tory party, the electorate (a good proportion of whom, it has to be said, actually accept the 'need for austerity' line) will plump for the original and the best.

Now of course this is terrible. Of course it is indicative of the triumph of austerity ideology. Of course it is similarly indicative of the weakness of the Left, a sign of how much work we have to do. And yet there is worse; it looks like a good number of trade union reps, sitting on the NPF for unions with clear anti-austerity policy, voted in favour of accepting Tory spending limits. If you need evidence of the depressing hold that the Labour leadership continues to have on the politics of trade unions, look no further.

See also Left Futures here.

A Unite delegate relaxes shortly after the NPF's vote on Christmas

Recovered Fragments : Marxism and Christianity

Thanks to Sub Speci Aeterni for preserving these. I'm annoyed that I've lost most of this series. Along with my reports on the 2010/11 UK student protests, it was my favourite stuff from the old blog.

....

I think that Marx’s account of alienated religion is correct, and backed by a mountain of empirical evidence. People do invest God with human properties (this, note, is the precisely the opposite of the move made by the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation); people do, moreover, look to some future afterlife for a happiness denied them here and now. God, for many, is a bloke (always a bloke) who behaves pretty much like a passive-aggressive petty dictator and who designed and made the world in much the same sense that Clive Sinclair designed and built the C5. Like the Thatcherite entrepreneur, this deity also has a beard (as Keith Flett will be delighted to learn). He is like us, only bigger. And he will make everything OK in heaven, so bear your poor pay and sexist boss with good grace.....

But, as Jesus might have said were he formed by reading Eagleton rather than Ezekiel, alas also for you New Atheists! This smug crowd are nothing more than the Feuerbachians of our own age, without the nuance. Precisely like Feuerbach they attend to the criticism of religious consciousness at the expense of the criticism of political oppression and economic exploitation. Turning the Marxian explanatory order on its head, they see religious illusion as primarily the cause of these evils, not as an effect of them. Religion, claimed Richard Dawkins shortly after 9/11, strapped the explosives to the bombers. In so doing, he occluded a clear understanding of the social conditions which give rise to fundamentalism, and stands subject to Marx’s critique..........

...if God gives rise to material, extended, temporal things, indeed to space and time themselves, then God cannot herself be one of these things. Or so argues a long tradition of religious thinkers including Maimonides and Aquinas. There is a problem, though. We can only speak and think, and for that matter worship, using concepts developed in our exploration of the material world. It is inevitable that our talk about God is somewhat unsuited to the task – we say God is strong, but we do not mean he can tug a truck, she has no body. “We can know that God exists”, writes Aquinas, “but not what he is”. This conceptual evasiveness is inevitable, but – so this tradition thinks – there is a danger in not taking these second-hand images of the divine with a healthy pinch of salt.