WeeklyWorker

22.11.2018

Sophistry in the service of Zionism

Brian Klug, the Oxford academic, cannot see the wood for the trees, writes Tony Greenstein

Brian Klug’s article in the Jewish Quarterly, ‘The left and the Jews’, is depressing and disappointing.1 How can such a talented academic succumb so easily to the Zionist campaign of defamation and denigration? It is not as if Brian has not himself been the subject of a similar campaign.

Brian was invited to address a November 2013 conference on anti-Semitism,2 for which a dossier of “international scholars and authors” was drawn up by the so-called Berlin International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism.3 According to Dr Clemens Henri, Brian “uses his Jewishness to endanger other Jews in Israel”, while professor Mordechai Kedar, an advocate of rape in war,4 described Brian as a “court Jew”, intent on making himself “acceptable to Jew-haters”, and professor Ephraim Karsh found it “mind-boggling” that a “proponent of anti-Semitism” (sic) should be invited at all.

However, the false anti-Semitism juggernaut seems to have impaired Brian’s critical faculties. His article is badly written, poorly argued, contradictory and at times incoherent. This is not the Brian Klug I got to know and like for over a decade. It represents blind intellectual panic in the face of a powerful political campaign.

November 11 was Polish Independence Day and president Andrzej Duda of the rightwing Law and Justice Party (PiS) marched, together with 200,000 other Poles, through the centre of Warsaw. The march was organised by the government and the neo-Nazi National Radical Camp (ONR). Amongst the slogans was “Poland, white and Catholic”. Still this was probably an improvement over last year, when “Pray for Islamic holocaust” competed with “Remove Jewry from power”.

None of this prevents Tory MEPs from being part of the European Conservative Reform (ECR) group in the European Parliament alongside the PiS. Surely this should be a cause célèbrefor those doughty fighters against ‘anti-Semitism in the Labour Party’ at the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Yet Brian’s article simply ignores this wider dimension.

The Israeli government is such good friends with Poland’s government that it has endorsed a new holocaust law which makes it an offence to say that some Poles took part in the holocaust. Netanyahu agreed to drop Israel’s opposition to the law in return for minor concessions. The headline in YNet was ‘Holocaust survivors feel betrayed by Polish-Israeli statement’.5 Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, is on record as saying that the Jews themselves were in part responsible for the holocaust, yet the leader of the Israeli Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, claims to be more worried about Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’.

One of the main protagonists in the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Corbyn, Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard, defended Michał Kamiński of the PiS - the former chair of the ECR group, who had excused those who burnt alive 1,600 Jews at Jedwabne in 1941 - calling him “one of the greatest friends to the Jews”.6

This is the background to Brian Klug’s recent essay, which is a good example of TS Elliot’s aphorism that most of the evil in the world is done by those with the best of intentions. Brian is an Oxford academic specialising in the study of anti-Semitism. He is not evil and he has the best of intentions. Nonetheless his essay in Jewish Quarterly gives comfort to those who do not. Even the title of his article, ‘The left and the Jews’, is misleading, implying that Jews are not part of the left - what it should be called is something like ‘The left and Zionism’. The subtitle, ‘Labour’s summer of discontent’, is little better.

Nowhere does Brian contextualise this “discontent”. In a phrase reminiscent of the Communist manifesto, Brian states that “the spectre of anti-Semitism has haunted Labour ever since Corbyn’s election as leader of the party”.7 But has it? If that were true, why would the Daily Mail be so concerned about this “spectre”? The same paper employed Katie Hopkins, who advocated a “final solution” for refugees,8 and was itself accused of waging an anti-Semitic campaign against Ed Miliband in 2013.9

Cross-purposes

It is not necessary to possess the gift of foresight in order to display some imagination. How will the period we are now living through be seen in 20-30 years? Does Brian really think that history will look on what is happening today as the recrudescence of anti-Semitism?

To ask the question is to answer it. All the fake anti-Semitism allegations and the microscopic examination of conversations from years past will evaporate. Eventually evidence will accumulate of a determined attempt by a combination of the American, Israeli and British states to overthrow a man who was seen as a threat to the western alliance. Corbyn stood for the Labour leadership on an anti-nuclear, anti-Nato platform and is simply unacceptable to the security establishment. It is a mark of the poverty of Brian’s analysis that not only does he fail to consider these questions, but does not even ask them. Instead he is trapped in the tired minutiae of Zionist accusations.

I first came across Brian at the founding meeting of Independent Jewish Voices in February 2007. We met each other occasionally for dinner until about two years ago, when the pro-Zionist ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign caused him to drift away from his analysis of how Zionism has used anti-Semitism as a false metonym.

Theoretically his understanding of anti-Semitism is second to none. The lecture he gave in 2013, on the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin - ‘What do we mean when we say anti-Semitism? Echoes of shattering glass’10 - is a wonderful exposition of what anti-Semitism is and is not. And his definition - “a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are” - is infinitely superior to that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.11 Brian’s opening statement was prescient:

What do we mean when we say ‘anti-Semitism’? Do we know what we mean? Does it matter? ... The word matters because the thing matters. It matters because, unless we use the same word in the same way, we will be talking at cross-purposes.

That has been the problem for the past three years. When Corbyn was accused of anti-Semitism he denied it, but this had no effect, because the ‘anti-Semitism’ he was being accused of was a different creature from that which he denied. His critics claimed that they were not really concerned about Israel, but they would, wouldn’t they? That this was a lie is evidenced by their insistence that Labour should accept a definition of anti-Semitism which conflated anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The IHRA’s author, Kenneth Stern, explained how the idea for a common definition was first articulated by Dina Porat in April 2004. Porat is the principal historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem - an institution that distorts the holocaust through a Zionist prism. She recently gave her blessing to prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s agreement with Poland’s government.12

Brian is living proof of Marx’s warning that “philosophers have only interpreted the world ... The point, however, is to change it.”13The unrelenting ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign of the past three years has also demonstrated the truth of another of Marx’s observations: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: ie, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”14

We see this in the way in which the IHRA definition has been imposed despite it lacking even a shred of intellectual justification. It has been savaged by academic and legal scholars alike: it has been called “bewilderingly imprecise”,15 “not a definition: it is indefinite”,16 and likely to “chill or ban criticism of Israeli policy ...”17 In reality, anti-Semitism is not difficult to define at all. The Oxford English Dictionary needs only six words: “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”.

Brian has accepted that the IHRA definition is “vague and rambling”, “not fit for purpose” anda “flawed initiative, based on a document itself deeply flawed”, yetLabour’s stillborn anti-Semitism code, which incorporated 95% of the IHRA, was nonetheless attacked by the Jewish Chronicle as “a cynical excercise [sic] in Jew hatred”.18 The JC was one of three Zionist papers that rejected this code of conduct in a joint front page. Brian asks:

What is this really about? Why the absence of measured criticism and reasoned debate? Why the blanket rejection of the NEC code … and insistence upon the IHRA definition tout court? Did it signify an alliance of forces with an anti-Corbyn and anti-left agenda? Or did it express a profound disquiet that Jewish people feel?

Brian chooses both answers! Yet Pollard, who branded Labour as “institutionally anti-Semitic”, was quite open. The problem was that “Labour has excised the parts [of the IHRA] which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic”.Despite this Brian prefers to give credence to this alliance of forces armed with an anti-Corbyn and anti-left agenda.19

Brian suggests that “A legitimate grievance has sunk in so deep that it is impossible to accept that ... this grievance has at last been taken on board by the party ....”20 In other words, the attacks on Corbyn and the Labour Party over the past three years were part of a “legitimate grievance”.

So when BOD president Jonathan Arkush welcomed Donald Trump to power,21 whilst condemning Jewdas (the Jewish group with whom Corbyn spent a Seder) as a “source of virulent anti-Semitism”, Brian sees no reason to challenge the bona fides of Corbyn’s accusers.22

You might have thought that after Pittsburgh - the product of Trump’s campaign against refugees - Brian might have rethought the notion that Zionism is concerned about anti-Semitism. Israel immediately sent the uber-racist, Naftali Bennett, to defendTrump before American Jewry23 despite his overt anti-Semitism. Or perhaps Brian has been persuaded that Trump cannot be anti-Semitic because ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’? Was the decision of the Zionist Organisation of America to invite Steve Bannon and neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka to its annual gala dinner an aberration? Has Brian forgotten what the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote?

In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.24

Bogus allegations

The Zionist movement has never been concerned with opposing anti-Semitism, which it sees as inherent in the non-Jew and ineradicable. It has been a shock to American Jewry to learn, with the advent of Trump, that anti-Semites can be ardent Zionists. Naomi Zeveloff declared that, “though it would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear”.25 The love affair between Zionism and anti-Semitism is a long, if not beautiful, one. If Brian has any doubts, then he should consult Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography and his praise for William Evans-Gordon, the founder of the British Brothers League, which was the precursor of Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. Arthur Balfour, the author of the Aliens Act 1905, is another hero to the Zionist movement.26

Although Marx wrote that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”,27 we have seen an ideological and political offensive which has in itself become a material force. The ‘debate’ on the IHRA has been one in which logic and argument are irrelevant.

When the Zionists insisted that the ‘Jewish community’ had the right to ‘self-define’ anti-Semitism, what they were really saying was that the IHRA was indefensible through reasoned and rational argument. All that mattered was the subjective - namely who supported the IHRA - although most Jews will never have read this definition drawn up at the instigation of the Israeli state. This is a specious argument.

What if another community were to argue that female genital mutilation is acceptable or that the burka should be made compulsory because their community supported it? Would Brian reach back into history for a justification? If the so-called Jewish right to self-determination conflicts with the rights of another group, the Palestinians, then it is illegitimate.

The false anti-Semitism campaign waged against the Labour Party for the past three years has rested on bogus and contrived allegations,28 yet Brian ignores all of this when he speaks of a “community of concern” about “anti-Semitism on the left”. These are weasel words. This “community of concern” stretches from those well-known anti-racist papers, The Sun and the Daily Mail, through to the BOD - a body which historically has opposed any mobilisation against anti-Semitism. In 1936 it called on Jews to stay at home when Moseley’s BUF tried to march through the East End in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street.29In the late 1970s it opposed the formation of the Anti-Nazi League.

Brian’s “spectre of anti-Semitism” rehashes all the tired and familiar allegations. Brian refers to the “drip-drip of toxic posts” on social media. No-one has died from or been deported because of a Facebook post. There is no evidence that anti-Semitism in Britain is increasing. Incidents of Islamophobia are four times more frequent and anti-Roma racism is over six times as high, yet we hear little about these forms of racism.30Indeed it is Muslims and black people who have borne the brunt of the false anti-Semitism campaign.

It is depressing that Brian uses as examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ Corbyn’s description of Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”. Hamas is virtually the creation of the Israeli state.31It is a conservative Palestinian resistance group, but it is not anti-Semitic. It has always made a distinction between Jews as a religion and Zionism - which is remarkable, since Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian children in the name of ‘the Jews’. Hamas condemned the recent Pittsburgh murders.32Hezbollah is the only military force to have successfully driven Israel out of Arab territory, but the fight of both these groups has never been against Israelis as Jews, but as occupiers. Neither organisation has ever attacked Jewish people outside Israel and the accusation of anti-Semitism against them is groundless.

Brian refers to a six-year-old mural brought out of the closet by Luciana Berger MP in time for the local elections last May. Opinions differ as to whether it was anti-Semitic, but it was defended by Corbyn on free speech grounds. Brian describes the bankers in it of having “huge noses”, although most of the criticism referred to “hooked noses”.33

Echoing Jonathan Sacks’ nonsense, Brian describes as “very troubling” a remark made by Corbyn five years ago, when he said a group of Zionists lacked a sense of “English irony”, even though they had been living here all their lives - unlike the Palestinian ambassador, who certainly knew how to use irony. The fact that Brian gives credence to the alleged anti-Semitism in this remark suggests that he himself has lost all sense of irony.

Having agreed that the IHRA definition was “not fit for purpose”, Brian alights on a quite novel explanation for the controversy around it. He accepts that it was about Zionism, but “the grounds for disquiet go deep and they go back a long way”. In fact they go back 42 years to UN resolution 3379, which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism”. Brian declares that this rendered Zionism “evil”.

Zionism, like South African apartheid and Nazism, did not originate with the devil, but is a product of human society. To the residents of Khan al-Ahmar, who are waiting for bulldozers to destroy their school, Zionism is indeed evil. It is Zionism, the ideology of Jewish supremacy, which dictates that the homes of the native population of Palestine must be destroyed to make way for Jewish settlers.

The inhabitants of the Negev village of Umm al-Hiran saw their homes demolished and their schoolteacher murdered, because they were not of the right race, yet Brian Klug, sitting in his Oxford college, sees Zionism as an ideology of liberation.

Anti-Zionist Jews

Brian’s attempt to rehabilitate Zionism began with a talk he gave34 to the Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism festival in July 2017.35 He based his critique on an article by Aurora Levins Morales - an Ashkenazi Puerto Rican feminist - in a book On anti-Semitism produced by Jewish Voice for Peace. Aurora refers to “a three-cornered argument” between orthodox Jews, Zionists and socialists/communists in her grandmother’s shtetl about the pogroms. Brian uses this to suggest that Zionism is Janus-faced - an ideology of emancipation as well as oppression.

It is true that there were debates amongst the Jews in Russia’s ‘Pale of Settlement’, but they were won decisively by the left. Most Jews supported the Bund or the revolutionaries, not the Zionists. Zionism was discredited because of its uncritical attitude towards the tsarist regime.

When the Bolsheviks overthrew the tsar, Poale Zion splintered and its left abandoned Zionism. The same thing happened in Poland. If there had been no colonisation in Palestine, then Zionism would have been just another utopian and messianic movement - not dissimilar to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa, which in effect was arguing for the self-deportation of American blacks. However, Zionism did colonise Palestine. Some 2.5 million Jews emigrated from Russia (although 98% of whom chose to go to the USA or Britain, not Palestine).

Brian plunders Aurora’s article selectively, but fails to mention her comment that “the three-cornered debate turned lopsided under the weight of despair, and the Zionist minority of my father’s childhood has grown to dominate all debate, aggressively silencing debate”, which is relevant to what is happening now. The Zionist ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party is about silencing black and Jewish anti-racists like Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker and myself. What it is not about is anti-Semitism.

Brian also omits Aurora’s own personal experience of Zionists, “who write to tell me that I should have died in a Nazi concentration camp before living to denounce the crimes of Israel ...” This is what Brian’s ‘emancipatory’ Zionism has turned into. Aurora’s essay is a very moving one, which she concludes by stating: “When I speak out for the humanity of Palestine, I am defending the humanity of everyone, including all Jews.”

Instead of looking for the obvious explanation of what has been happening - ie, the weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’ - Brian reaches for his very own conspiracy theory. UN resolution 3379, passed in 1975, “flattened a national movement”, he says. This is total nonsense. There is no evidencethat a UN resolution which no-one remembers has had any impact on the debates. In any event, Zionism has never been a Jewish national movement, since the Jews are not a nation.

The Zionist movement was a very distinct minority in pre-holocaust Europe. In 1938, in the last free elections in Poland before the Nazi occupation, the anti-Zionist Bund won 17 out of the 20 Jewish Council seats in Warsaw, with 61.7% of the vote, compared to one seat for the Zionists. In the second city, Łódź, they won 57.4% of the vote and 11 out of 17 seats.

Zionism in Poland and Russia was a movement of collaboration with anti-Semitism. Theodor Herzl visited Count von Plehve, the tsarist interior minister, in 1903, barely four months after the Kishinev pogrom which von Plehve organised. Herzl promised that the Jews would not oppose the tsarist regime if Zionism was a legal movement. As Isaac Deutscher wrote,

... the great majority of east European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the second World War, opposed to Zionism ... the most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers - those who spoke Yiddish ... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from east Europe to Palestine, ... of an exodus from the countries in which they had their homes and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries [in which] the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry: ‘Jews, get out!’ The Zionists were agreeing to ‘get out’.36

Brian argued in his talk to the SWP that Zionism “belongs to two opposite histories at one and the same time”. It is, on the one hand, “part of the story of British imperialism” and, on the other, “the exodus from Europe of a persecuted people”. Zionism “spoke the language of colonisation, but it was colonisation for the sake of emancipation”.

Zionism was based on a rejection of emancipation. Herzl wrote in The Jewish statethat “In the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.”37 Max Nordau, Herzl’s deputy, similarly attacked emancipation in his address to the first Zionist Congress in 1897.38

Zionism saw its future in an alliance with one or other of the imperialist powers. Herzl spent his life trying to persuade various European rulers, as well as the pope, of the merits of Zionism. When he met the Grand Duke of Baden, uncle of the kaiser, “His chief misgiving was that if he supported the [Zionist] cause, people would misinterpret this as anti-Semitism on his part.”39

The idea that Zionism was “colonisation for the sake of emancipation” is a contradiction in terms. Colonisation is no more emancipatory than rape or genocide (and often involves both). Brian writes that “the radical left places Zionism ... among the rich and powerful, two classic anti-Semitic tropes: the capitalist class with its imperialist ambitions”. Elsewhere he speaks about a “demonising discourse about Zionism”. This is dishonest and lazy.

From its inception Zionism sought an alliance with the rich and powerful - not least Jewish magnates, such as the Rothschilds, although Herzl was none too successful: “I consider the house of Rothschild a national misfortune for the Jews.”40 The Jewish statewas written in response to the failure of his meeting with Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a railroad magnate - the George Soros of his time.41 In 1917, when the Balfour declaration was issued, the British empire was the richest and the most powerful in the world. It sponsored Zionism in the same way as US imperialism does today. Brian himself admits that “Zionism is indeed implicated, in more ways than one, in the history of European imperialism and colonialism”.42Is this too anti-Semitic or just incoherent?

Brian refers to “sinister talk of a Jewish or Zionist lobby that wields ... influence out of all proportion to its small size”. Perhaps, but the Zionist lobby certainly claims it is powerful and is perceived as such. There is absolutely no doubt that the Zionist lobby groups, both in the United States and now in this country, often in alliance with the far/alt-right, are attacking basic freedoms of speech and assembly via the IHRA. Kenneth Stern, who drew up the IHRA, in his testimony to the House of Representatives in November 2017, warned that the IHRA was “being employed in an attempt to restrict academic freedom and punish political speech”.

Useful fool

Brian Klug is playing the part of Zionism’s useful fool by giving today’s McCarthyism his blessing. What is sinister is the gathering of personal information on Palestine solidarity activists by Canary Mission43 and allied groups in order to compile blacklists and prevent them gaining future employment. Either Brian is out of the loop or being tenured and does not quite appreciate what this means. As the newly released Al Jazeera films show, Canary Mission has been funded by a number of Jewish federations and charities.44

The clincher in Brian’s argument about ‘left’ anti-Semitism is the story of ‘Daphne’. Brian likes it so much that he included it in his SWP talk as well as his article. Daphne is a “Jewish anti-Zionist, fiercely opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza (as, incidentally, many self-described Zionists are too).”

Just stop there, Brian. That is not true. Very few Zionists are opposed to the siege of Gaza. Who? I have not heard them condemn the barbarous treatment meted out, which is best typified by the careful calculation of the daily intake of calories needed to keep Gaza ‘on a diet’. Perhaps Brian is unaware that in the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto the Nazis also calculated the daily intake of calories it granted the inmates. Admittedly the Israeli calculation allows for a bare existence, but the principle is still the same.

At her local Labour Party meeting Daphne proposed a motion criticising Ken Livingstone for “linking Hitler and Zionism”. Daphne explained that her motion had nothing to do with Livingstone’s views on Israel, but people did not agree. Everyone who spoke against the motion “suggested that it was part of a plot by Israel or that it was an attempt to prevent discussion of Israel”. Daphne felt like “an agent of the Israeli state”.

Leaving aside that this is all hearsay, Daphne was wrong. The attacks on Livingstone had everything to do with Israel. Why else did the Jewish Labour Movement turn it into a major campaign? Why did the Zionist movement single out Livingstone for vitriol? It was not because he kept newts. The JLM gathered like vultures outside his disciplinary hearing.45

Daphne objected to “linking Hitler and Zionism” because “the holocaust is part of the identity of all Jews, whatever they may feel about Israel”. The holocaust is part of Jewish identity, but it is also instrumentalised by Zionism, as Israeli historians Tom Segev and Edith Zirtal have documented, as justification for Zionism’s colonising project. As Brian knows, it was wielded against Aurora in the most disgusting of fashions. She was accused of “betraying the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis”, because she believed that “Jewish safety lay in solidarity with other working people”. If Daphne seriously believes that we must preserve the holocaust in aspic, then she is living on another planet. As for Livingstone’s statement that the Nazis supported Zionism, it is a fact easily provable historically.

Brian argues that “the word ‘Zionist’ has a life of its own, independently of anyone’s intentions”. Even if that were true, it would be meaningless. Clearly the far right uses ‘Zionist’ to mean ‘Jew’, but then so do Zionists themselves. Zionism is as Zionism does. It is the ideology of the current Israeli state. Israel is the most racist state in the world and Zionism is called in evidence, whenever it wants to justify its most appalling deeds. When a plurality of Israeli Jews want to expel Israel’s Palestinian citizens, they do so as Zionists.46

When Netanyahu argued that illegal African immigrants threaten the identity of the Jewish state47 and the Israeli Labour Party supported him in this, they did it in the name of Zionism and a demographic Jewish majority.48 Zionism is not a ghost in a long-forgotten Jewish shtetl. It is an apartheid, nuclear state - militaristic and on the far right politically. When supporters of Israel defend Jewish-only towns, segregated and unequal education, the imprisonment of Palestinian children, they do this by crying ‘anti-Semitism’ in response to criticism.

It would seem that Brian Klug has now crossed the border and is endorsing these blasphemers. It has been a tough three years and when the going gets tough academics are often the first to cave in. Brian, with all his erudition and sophistication, has abandoned those of us who are not willing to throw in the towel. He has abandoned the most oppressed for the sake of Jewish chauvinism, dressed up as a concern about ‘anti-Semitism’.

Perhaps the last word should be that of Avi Shlaim, an Israeli and professor of international relations at St Anthony’s College, Oxford University:

Anti-Semitism is not a real phenomenon within the Labour Party or any of the other major political parties. There are anti-Semitic incidents, but they are usually related to Israel’s behaviour, Israeli brutality. So every time there is an Israeli attack on Gaza - and there have been three in the last seven years - there is a rise in anti-Semitic episodes and incidents in Britain.

Fundamentally Israel and the Israeli propaganda machine and Israel’s friends in England and the Israel lobby in Britain deliberately confuse or conflate - and I stress they do it deliberately - anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Anti-Semitism is hatred of the Jews as Jews. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Israel as a colonial power and as an exclusive Jewish state49.

Notes

1. https://jewishquarterly.org/2018/10/the-left-and-the-jews.

2. ‘Anti-Semitism in Europe today: the phenomena, the conflicts’ (see www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-23374).

3. http://bicsa.org/wp-content/uploads/BICSA-International-Scholars-criticize-Brian-Klug-ZfA-EVZ-Jewish-museum-Berlin-Nov-20133.pdf.

4. www.haaretz.com/.premium-prof-s-words-on-stopping-terror-draws-ire-1.5256331.

5. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5304851,00.html.

6. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/09/michal-kaminski-antisemitism.

7. “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism” - K Marx Communist manifesto 1848.

8. See www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/26/katie-hopkins-leaves-lbc-radio-final-solution-tweet-manchester-attack.

9. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/10/03/daily-mail-accused-of-ant_n_4035379.html.

10. www.jmberlin.de/sites/default/files/antisemitism-in-europe-today_2-klug.pdf. For some inexplicable reason, the report of this conference is dated November 2014, when it took place in November 2013.

11. www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism.

12. See www.timesofisrael.com/yad-vashem-historian-we-can-live-with-israeli-polish-holocaust-declaration.

13. K Marx, ‘Theses on Feurbach’: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

14. K Marx and F Engels The German ideology: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology.

15. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/28/britain-definition-antisemitism-british-jews-jewish-people.

16. www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n09/stephen-sedley/defining-anti-semitism.

17. www.doughtystreet.co.uk/news/article/ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-is-not-fit-for-purpose.

18. ‘Labour’s new guidelines show it is institutionally anti-Semitic’ Jewish Chronicle July 5 2018.

19. Ibid.

20. ‘The code of conduct for anti-Semitism: a tale of two texts’ Open Democracy July 17: www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brian-klug/code-of-conduct-for-antisemitism-tale-of-two-texts.

21. www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/board-of-deputies-president-jonathan-arkush-under-fire-after-message-congratulating-trump-1.54660.

22. www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/jonathan-arkush-claims-jewdas-is-a-source-of-virulent-antisemitism-1.461817.

23. https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/413225/naftali-bennett-very-unfair-to-blame-trump-for-pittsburgh-bloodbath.

24. T Herzl Diaries of Theodor Herzl London 1958, p6.

25. https://forward.com/news/israel/354402/how-steve-bannon-and-breitbart-news-can-be-pro-israel-and-anti-semitic-at-t/?attribution=home-hero-item-text-1.

26. C Weizmann Trial and error: autobiography Westport 1972, pp90-91.

27. K Marx Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm.

28. https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-lobby-manufactured-uk-labour-partys-anti-semitism-crisis/16481.

29. See The Guardian September 25 2016.

30. See the Pew Global attitudes survey 2016: www.pewglobal.org/2016/07/11/europeans-fear-wave-of-refugees-will-mean-more-terrorism-fewer-jobs/lede-chart-2.

31. ‘How Israel helped create Hamas’ Washington Post July 30 2014: www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/?utm_term=.141830c5705a.

32. Statement: ‘Hamas condemns terror attack on Pittsburgh Synagogue’, October 28 2018 (http://hamas.ps/en/post/1646/hamas-condemns-terror-attack-on-pittsburgh-synagogue).

33. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5538549/Labour-fury-Corbyn-defending-anti-Semitic-public-mural.html.

34. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkkpKlSvH4.

35. See www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/blog/zionism-antisemitism-left-today.

36. I Deutscher, ‘The Russian Revolution and the Jewish question’ ‘The non-Jewish Jew’ and other essays London 1981, pp66-67.

37. http://www.zionism-israel.com/js/Jewish_State.html.

38. See ‘Max Nordau’, ‘Failure of emancipation’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Nordau#Failure_of_emancipation.

39. www.jewishmag.com/145mag/herzl_hechler/herzl_hechler.htm.

40. W Laqueur The history of Zionism New York 1972, p102.

41. www.britannica.com/biography/Theodor-Herzl#ref26683.

42. ‘Zionism, anti-Semitism and the left today’: www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/blog/zionism-antisemitism-left-today.

43. J Nathan-Kazis, ‘Revealed: Canary Mission blacklist is secretly bankrolled by major Jewish federation’ The Forward October 3 2018.

44. Ibid.

45. www.jlm.org.uk/not_in_my_name.

46. Pew Research Centre, March 8 2016: www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society.

47. www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/20/israel-netanyahu-african-immigrants-jewish.

48. www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/labor-party-s-support-of-deporting-asylum-seekers-cheapens-the-israeli-opposition-1.5467572.

49. https://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/avi-shlaim-video/#sthash.IvfV4uu9.dpbs.