Contemporary Left Antisemitism

David Hirsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315304298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Today's antisemitism is difficult to recognize because it does not come dressed in a Nazi uniform and it does not openly proclaim its hatred or fear of Jews. This book looks at the kind of antisemitism which is tolerated or which goes unacknowledged in apparently democratic spaces: trade unions, churches, left-wing and liberal politics, social gatherings of the chattering classes and the seminars and journals of radical intellectuals. It analyses how criticism of Israel can mushroom into antisemitism and it looks at struggles over how antisemitism is defined. It focuses on ways in which those who raise the issue of antisemitism are often accused of doing so in bad faith in an attempt to silence or smear. Hostility to Israel has become a signifier of identity, connected to opposition to imperialism, neo-liberalism and global capitalism; the 'community of the good' takes on toxic ways of imagining most living Jewish people.

1

Ken Livingstone and the Livingstone Formulation

Many antiracist people in our time have been educated to recognize the accusation of antisemitism, rather than the antisemitism itself, as the dirty trick. They hear it as an attempt to smear and silence people who criticize Israel. Today’s antisemitism incorporates the notion that those who complain about antisemitism are the racists. It treats the opponents of antisemitism, not the antisemites, as the cynical ones; it treats opponents of antisemitism, not the antisemites, as the powerful ones. In the wake of the Brexit and Trump movements, we are seeing opponents of other kinds of racism too being designated as the powerful ones, while racism itself is interpreted as the cry of the oppressed.

In 2006, after Ken Livingstone had been accused of antisemitism, he responded with a counter-accusation that he was being accused in this way only in order to silence his criticism of Israel. This response I named the Livingstone Formulation. This chapter begins by looking at Livingstone’s own long career of hostility to Israel and at his relationship to antisemitism, and how in 2016 he found himself suspended from the Labour Party over the issue. The chapter goes on to look at the Livingstone Formulation itself and how it has become such a standard rhetorical manoeuvre. The Livingstone Formulation – the counter-allegation of Zionist conspiracy which treats discussion of antisemitism as though it were a vulgar, dishonest and tribal fraud – is a thread which runs throughout this form of contemporary antisemitism; and it re-appears relentlessly through the course of this book. Ken Livingstone is not responsible for the Livingstone Formulation, and he did not invent it; it is an honorary title rather than one which he really earned.

In May 1981, two years after Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister, Labour won the election for the Greater London Council (GLC). Ken Livingstone called a meeting of Labour members of the council the following day, and the left-wing Labour councillors defeated Labour leader Andrew McIntosh, putting Livingstone into place as leader of the GLC. The left was ascendant in local government in the cities, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was on the rise; the left in the Labour Party was strong; feminist, lesbian and gay and antiracist movements were seeking common cause in the ‘liberation movements’; the miners’ strike of 1984–85 posed a significant challenge to the government.

Ken Livingstone became a popular spokesperson for the radical socialist opposition to Margaret Thatcher. After the miners had been defeated, the Local Government Act was passed in 1985, which abolished a whole tier of institutions in which the left was strong: the metropolitan counties and the Greater London Council. Ken Livingstone headed a high-profile campaign to ‘save the GLC’; the dying GLC put on a number of popular free concerts at which Livingstone and other figures of the left made radical speeches.

After Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ took power, a London-wide election was re-instituted for the position of Mayor. Having failed to secure the Labour Party’s nomination, Ken Livingstone stood as an Independent in the 2000 election, and he won. He won again in 2004 as the official Labour candidate and was only defeated by the Tories in 2008 and again in 2012.

For four decades, Ken Livingstone was a celebrated and successful leading socialist in the UK; he was well known in the mainstream, and, on the left, he was widely admired.

In late April 2016, Naz Shah, the woman who had defeated George Galloway for the Parliamentary seat of Bradford West, was exposed in blogs and in the press for having published material on Facebook which could be interpreted as antisemitic. In particular, she shared an image which depicted an outline of the United States of America with, somewhere near Nebraska, a small shape of Israel superimposed onto it; the caption was ‘re-locate Israel into the United States’ (Author unknown 2016a).¹ This material was meant to be amusing and clever, but joking about the ‘transportation’ of five million Jews out of the Middle East was thought by many to be far from funny. A significant amount of other material shared by Naz Shah on social media emerged, most of it from the time of the Gaza war of 2014. Shah had published an image on Facebook which portrayed ‘Apartheid’ Israel as being similar to ‘Hitler’ (Author unknown 2016b). She had also warned that ‘The Jews’ were ‘rallying’ against a claim that Israel was committing war crimes (Author unknown 2016c).

Naz Shah was one of the most high profile of a number of Labour figures whose antisemitic comments were coming to light at this time, and she was formally suspended from Party membership. Usually, people on the left angrily deny all charges of antisemitism, and they accuse those making the accusations of doing so in bad faith in order to harm the left or to silence criticism of Israel. But Naz Shah made an immediate and plausible apology; she promised to re-think what she had done, and she said that she wanted to understand the issues of Israel and Palestine, and antisemitism, better (Stewart, Mason and Parveen 2016). She went on to meet with a number of Jewish communal leaders and scholars of antisemitism. A few weeks later she had a meeting with Jewish congregants at her local synagogue and talked some of these issues through at length. She said there:

It is my job in the Muslim Community to highlight the issues of anti-Semitism. Going to Auschwitz is a fantastic idea but it won’t fix the problem. We need to educate the community. It’s up to me to own the narrative. To have conversations with the Muslim community [about antisemitism] and that’s my responsibility.

(Cohen, J. 2016)

Justin Cohen reported that she told the gathering of 130 community members from Leeds, Bradford and York that she wanted to make a ‘real apology’ rather than a ‘politician’s apology’, adding: ‘I looked at myself and asked whether I had prejudice against Jewish people. But I realised I was ignorant and I want to learn about the Jewish faith and culture. I do not have hatred for Jewish people’ (2016). Naz Shah has since had her membership of the party reinstated.

Ken Livingstone, by contrast, was absolutely not in a mood to apologize for antisemitism. He took to the radio stations on 27 April in a mood to counter-attack. Defending Naz Shah, even after she herself had apologized, he said on BBC Radio London that she was a victim of a ‘well-orchestrated campaign by Israel lobby’. He said:

She’s a deep critic of Israel and its policies. Her remarks were over the top but she’s not anti-Semitic. I’ve been in the Labour party for 47 years; I’ve never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians but I’ve never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic ….

It’s completely over the top but it’s not anti-Semitic. Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews. The simple fact in all of this is that Naz made these comments at a time when there was another brutal Israeli attack on the Palestinians.

(May 2016a)²

Livingstone presumptuously explained Naz Shah’s record by assuming that what she thinks is what he thinks; he assumed the right to explain on her behalf.

The claim from Livingstone that he had never heard anyone say anything antisemitic in his forty-seven years in the party is important. It is evidence for the view that for Livingstone there is nothing that anybody could say which – if it was said in a left-wing antiracist space, and if it related in any way to Israel – could be understood as antisemitic. In half a century of activism, he has never heard such a thing: only criticism of Israel.

And in that interview he went on to articulate a common position in one who is defending against a charge of antisemitism, which is a willingness to plead guilty to a lesser charge – to anything so long as it is not antisemitism: ‘It’s completely over the top but it’s not anti-Semitic,’ he said. For Livingstone, antisemitism on the left is close to being a contradiction in terms; he has never once seen it; it does not exist. He can plead guilty to being vulgar, stupid, rude or belligerent, but there is no guilty plea to a crime which does not, and cannot, exist.

And then Ken Livingstone turned to the claim that Naz Shah had shared on Facebook that ‘apartheid Israel’ was comparable to Hitler. One of the ways in which he defended the claim that Zionists were like Hitler was to re-state the old antizionist claim that Hitler was a supporter of Zionism, a claim which suggests to the listener that Zionism and Hitlerism are similar. Ken Livingstone has a particular attachment to comparing everything which he finds bad in political life to Hitler; in particular, he has a track record of comparing Israel and Jews to Nazis.

Most people know that Zionism was in fact a response to antisemitism; most people know that Hitler was not interested in responding to antisemitism because he was an antisemite. But for people from a certain current of left antizionism, comparing Zionism to Nazism is irresistible. First, Nazism is popularly understood as the supreme example of the horrors to which race-thinking can lead; and Zionism is said to embody, at its heart, the same kind of race-thinking. Second, Zionism is said to have in common with Nazism the assumption that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together in Europe; this is then portrayed as an ideological similarity, a shared critique of multiculturalism. Third, Zionism, as an ideology which is cast as being akin to Nazism, is said to have created a state and a society which is akin to that created by National Socialism. This analogy is potent on the level of emotion as well as on the level of reason. ‘Scientifically’ to portray Nazism and Zionism as similar is to try to make people feel towards Zionism the great loathing that good people feel towards Nazism. To say that something is like Nazism is to say that it is morally reprehensible. But to propagate the notion that Zionists – that is, the overwhelming majority of Jews – are in particular like Nazis adds a specific Jew-baiting dimension.

It is to be remembered that Ken Livingstone has been part of the hard-core antizionist movement in the UK since the days when it was a small, fringe, obsessive and eccentric clique. In 1981, when he was already leader of the GLC, Livingstone was made the figurehead editor of a left-wing newspaper called Labour Herald. It was edited by Ted Knight, a leading Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) member. The WRP was a significant Trotskyist group in Britain which eventually broke apart when plausible allegations emerged that its leadership had been guilty of the rape and sexual abuse of younger members (Matgamna 2003). Labour Herald was also financed by the WRP, which was in turn supported by Colonel Gadafi and other Arab Nationalist dictators; the WRP spied on Arab dissidents in London too, reporting back to the murderous regimes in the Middle East (Dovkants 2008). Already in the 1980s, Livingstone’s paper ran a cartoon depicting the Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, wearing a Nazi uniform, doing a straight arm salute and standing on a heap of skulls.³

In 1983, Lenni Brenner wrote ‘Zionism in the Age of Dictators’ (2014). It was an antizionist polemic and not taken seriously by mainstream scholars. Paul Bogdanor (2016) notes:

Livingstone had written in his memoirs that Brenner’s work ‘helped form my view of Zionism and its history’ (Livingstone 2011: 223). The book is a fixture of antizionist and antisemitic propaganda about the Holocaust on both the far left and on the far right, and Brenner has a cult following among those convinced that ‘Zionists’ are to blame for all evil in the world.

Jim Allen was inspired by Brenner to write Perdition, a play which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1987. Perdition draws upon the story of Rudolf Kastner and the later controversies regarding later accusations that were made against him of collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust in Hungary. Allen takes this morally and historically complex and contested story, and he makes out of it a morality tale of Zionist collaboration with Hitler.

Bogdanor (2016)⁴ writes:

Allen characterised his play in these terms: ‘Without any undue humility I’m saying that this is the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist’.

When Ken Livingstone was asked in 2016 why he found it so compelling, he replied:

Lenni’s book shows a shared common belief between the Nazis and the Zionists in preserving their race from interracial marriage and things like that. They wanted to preserve their ethnic purity and that’s why they had a working relationship.

(Bogdanor 2016)⁵

In the 1980s there was a small clique of antizionists, many of them Jewish, who created for themselves a narrative, which became for them common sense, that Zionism was like Nazism, that it collaborated with Nazism and that it created a Nazi state. There were activists and historians who stood toe to toe with these antizionists, who followed all their polemics and their intricate and obscure sources, and who critiqued their interpretations and their conclusions.⁶

Now in 2016, these issues were moving into the mainstream. Labour MPs and activists were being scrutinized, the leader of the Party himself was accused of being an antizionist with a long history of links with antisemitic ideas and politics, and the debates were being had in the newspapers, on radio, and on television, as well as on social media and the blogs.

Ken Livingstone, for years a great communicator of socialist ideas to a general audience, suddenly found himself saying things in public which were quite normal in his own circles but which sounded eccentric on BBC Radio London. They were now to be challenged in a much more public arena. The most prominent and immediate challenge came from John Mann.

John Mann is now the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a central driving force behind parliamentary initiatives against contemporary antisemitism both in the UK and globally. His political career began in the 1980s when he was a leader of the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS). Part of his own formative political education, therefore, was forged in a fight with those who were pushing these demonizing narratives about Zionism; some of the same activists were, in the early 1980s, involved in campaigns to ban student Jewish societies on the basis that they were Zionist and therefore racist and so in violation of Student Union ‘no-platform’ policies (Rich 2016a).

John Mann responded to Ken Livingstone’s claim that ‘Hitler was supporting Zionism … before he went mad’. Mann confronted Livingstone as he entered a BBC radio building on 28 April 2016, the same day he made the claim about Hitler. Mann managed to accuse Livingstone, loudly and clearly, in front of a TV crew, of being a ‘disgusting racist’, of ‘re-writing history’, of ‘lying’ and of being a ‘Nazi apologist’.⁷ Video of the confrontation went viral on social media within an hour, and it appeared on television and radio news and in the papers the next day. In mainstream discourse, the accusation that the Jewish state had been supported by Hitler and the assertion that Hitler only ‘went mad’, read became genocidal, after 1932 looked eccentric in the extreme.

Ken Livingstone continued to double down and continued to insist that he was right about Hitler and Zionism. He was relying on, and distorting the purpose of, one moment of Nazi policy, the ‘Haavara agreement’, when there was a Nazi plan to deport Jews from Germany and make some money out of them by allowing them to move to Palestine, with German goods that they had been forced to buy. But politically, the gulf between trying to make Germany Jew-free by finding places to deport them to, on the one hand, and ‘supporting Zionism’, on the other, is unbridgeable. One analogy that was cir...