Letters

Crimean Anschluss

Mike Macnair argues (‘No change of line’ Weekly Worker January 22) that Russia’s ‘annexation’ of Crimea means that Israel is no longer unique in its territorial aggrandisement, in violation of the Nuremberg principles and UN charter, alleging that Russia’s ‘annexation’ of Crimea has ended this particular uniqueness. In view of the ‘unusual’ status (line 1) of that article, it was a great pity comrade Macnair was not, I understand, present at the Online Communist Forum on January 21, where sharp views were exchanged about Russian foreign policy, especially vis-à-vis its ‘near abroad’. If indeed Ukraine should not be described rather as a very near abroad, having been part of the USSR since that state was founded - not true of the Baltics or of Bukovina/Ruthenia, for example, let alone of Poland or Romania - or even the locus of ‘Finlandization’.

More time was devoted to the Russophones of continental Ukraine (ie, apart from the Crimea) - though less to the US intervention in the Maidan and its Samantha Power-style of ‘not standing idly by’; but in his article, comrade Macnair likens to the Israeli occupation (of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights) the Russian liberation of the Crimea from its subordination to Kiev (okay, Kyiv). That subordination dates only from Nikita Sergeyevich’s reckless and frivolous 1954 cession of Crimea to Ukraine, vaunting a tricentenary of the 1654 adhesion of Ukraine to Great Russia. (I’m no fan of Great Russia; I merely distinguish it from, eg, Belarus/Byelorussia/Little Russia, etc).

I gather that at the main body of that discussion, only one comrade mentioned the lack of any significant - especially civilian - Ukrainian residents in Crimea, pointing out that any relevant minority with qualms about the Russo-Crimean unification (call it Anschluss, if you like) was the long-standing (dating from pre-1783) Tartar population, whose reservations did not include a desire to unite with Ukraine. Moreover, the referendums in Crimea showed no significant support for continued government from Kyiv - all right, Mike?- except - in the first one, a preference to remain within a state form which included both Russia and Ukraine: ie, the Soviet status quo.

Russian liberation, much less roughly executed than many such unifications, resembled Israeli wars of conquest as chalk resembles cheese - indeed, less so. The so-called international community, and its acceptance of Khrushchev’s ideological “master-stroke”, simply brings discredit on what has become, since 1990, no more than a gang of robbers, as Lenin described the League of Nations.

Oleh Hrehoryuk
email

Hung parliament

The Labour Party is crowing that it might gain 100 seats from the Conservatives, but that would make Labour only the largest party in a hung Parliament. In the normal course of events, Labour would have become the largest party in a hung parliament this year, five years after the 2017 general election, if Keir Starmer had not unilaterally abandoned its clear 2017 manifesto commitment to Brexit.

Boris Johnson seized his opportunity and called the 2019 election. The seats that Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019 were almost all in Leave-voting areas, and they had all returned Labour MPs under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, yet the party plans to go into the next general election under the man who had caused those losses. The polls are narrowing. Starmer’s Labour will be very lucky indeed to be even so much as the largest party in a hung parliament.

David Lindsay
Durham

Bogus charges

Now that Labour Against the Witchhunt has gone, who is leading the charge against bogus anti-Semitism? Like many others on the left, I was dismayed at the recent news that Labour’s NEC voted (by 23 votes to 14) against reinstating Jeremy Corbyn to the parliamentary party. His crime? Pointing out that the scale of anti-Semitism has been dramatically overstated by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. But he was simply telling the truth. The interviewees featured in Bad news for Labour, published in 2019, thought that 25-40% of party members had had complaints made about them for anti-Semitism. In fact, only 0.1% had been investigated!

Those of us who have suffered for criticising Israel face an uphill struggle to regain our reputations as anti-racists. We may have lost round one, but we need to be more prepared for round two. The Tory government proposes legislation outlawing local authorities from boycotting Israeli products to help support Palestine. Those against such a clear attack on our local democracy will likely face the slurs of bogus anti-Semitism, once more bandied about by Zionist bodies such as the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Community Security Trust, backed by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

These agencies know that hysteria about anti-Semitism is their most potent weapon in fooling the British public into thinking that boycotting Israel is somehow wrong. And with 36% of Labour MPs in Labour Friends of Israel - including many highly influential ones, party leader Keir Starmer for example - I foresee little opposition to the Tory plans in Westminster (notwithstanding last year’s conference motion in support of BDS, condemned by the LFI chair as “morally repugnant”). We need to give politicians supporting BDS the confidence to loudly criticise Israel, without fear of being condemned as anti-Semitic for so doing.

As we know, the press loves to publish tales of anti-Semitism; we need to challenge this. For example, I was criticised by the Guardian for giving a speech on bogus anti-Semitism to the Keep Talking group. They declared that I had spoken at a meeting alongside holocaust deniers. When I pointed out that I was the only one on the platform that evening and a holocaust denier had simply asked a question from the audience, the Guardian argued that they were factually correct in that both of us had actually “spoken” at the meeting. It is this kind of ridiculous guilt by association that we need to expose. As I and many others have found, the Independent Press Standards Organisation will rarely act around media slandering. The agency one would have hoped to take a stand, Liberty, steadfastly refuses to speak out.

We think it is time we tried again to highlight that there is little truth in these slurs of anti-Semitism; that the IHRA definition used to scapegoat campaigners is purposely skewed to undermine criticism of Israel. We are launching a new body to challenge the lies propounded by the Campaign Against Antisemitism. We are calling it the Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism, or Caba, for short.

Caba will be a volunteer-led group dedicated to exposing and countering bogus anti-Semitism - through education and championing those unjustly accused. It will outline how the IHRA has undermined our right to speak on Israel, highlight legal battles lost and won, feature a ‘rogues gallery’ of those slandered, clarifying what they have actually done to merit Zionist efforts to unjustly ‘cancel’ them. It will endeavour to give support and advice to those who are being ‘investigated’. It will publish and distribute flyers at events, in support of those attacked. It will promote awareness of the Left Legal Fighting Fund. Through press releases and letter-writing campaigns, it will lobby politicians and the media, publishing articles exposing bogus allegations and the real motives of the bodies behind them. It will promote Zoom interviews featuring those in the firing line.

Thus far there are eight of us - we have set out the policies and beliefs we consider should underpin Caba’s work at our draft website at www.bogusantisemitism.org.

We invite Weekly Worker readers to either join (it’s free) or just sign up to our occasional newsletter. And we would welcome interest from those that might assist on the steering group to help shape our work.

Pete Gregson
Campaign Against Bogus Antisemitism

Support BDS

I am disappointed that Daniel Lazare should adopt the method of left sectarians out of touch with mass movements, in attacking Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions using Zionist whataboutery. He quotes Marx in his support but forgets that Marx gave unconditional support to the Fenians and the cause of Irish liberation, most notably in his assertion that a nation that oppresses another nation will not itself be free.

The demand for boycotting Israel comes from the Palestinians themselves and, if only for that reason, it should be supported. Socialists support oppressed nations against their oppressors.

Lazare argues that we say that ‘Israel is singularly evil’. This is a moralist caricature of the argument for BDS beloved of the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. No one talks of Israel as ‘evil’. Our arguments rest upon the fact that Israel is unique today as a settler-colonial state which is intent on ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the land and reducing those left to hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Lazare’s argument that Saudi Arabia is ‘without equal “when it comes to sheer bloody repression” is reminiscent of that of apologists for apartheid South Africa, who were forever pointing to the ‘evil’ black states surrounding it and their human rights record. Lazare is incapable of understanding that Israel, like South Africa and Nazi Germany before it, is unique in that it subjects the Palestinian population, whatever their class, to permanent racial subjugation.

Yes there are many repressive states, but states based on racial supremacy are in a category of their own, not least because they result in the settler working class abandoning their class allegiance for racial solidarity with their rulers.

Lazare seems oblivious to the fact that it is the bourgeoisie everywhere which is waging war on BDS. In the US it is the Republican Party and the corporate Democrats who are most opposed to BDS, to the extent that commercial contracts in states like Texas are dependent on opposition to BDS. Lazare is quite content, however, to align himself with the majority of the US bourgeoisie.

Lazare doesn’t understand the difference between a settler-colonial state like Israel, the west’s guard dog in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia, a creature of British and US imperialism. The Saudi Arabian ruling class has no mass base, and, but for US support, would have fallen long ago. The same is true of the Gulf sheikhdoms. The Israeli state does have a mass base, not least its working class, and it achieves this through an intra-class alliance with the Jewish working class, for whom the Palestinians are their main enemy.

The Tempest Collective is perfectly correct to say that the Israeli working class is no ally. Lazare is incapable of seeing that in settler-colonial states the working class identifies with its own bourgeoisie. Indeed, it is to the right of that bourgeoisie in opposing any movement towards equality.

In Northern Ireland, who constituted the support base of the loyalist death squads and the UDA/UVF, if not the Protestant working class, which for over 50 years allied with the unionist ruling class? And when that same unionist ruling class made tentative moves towards granting Catholics equality, brought it down with a general strike by the Ulster Workers Council in 1974. No doubt Lazare, if he had been living in Ireland at the time, would have joined the UDA/UVF in a strike whose supporters included the most reactionary sections of the unionist establishment.

Lazare says that it makes little sense to call on the US to impose sanctions against Israel, since it is the source of the problem. This is both mechanistic and simple. Israel is not simply an extension of US imperialism. It has agency of its own, and on certain issues, like relations with China, there is a clear difference. If Lazare’s argument holds water then it made little sense to call for US sanctions against South Africa either.

Surprisingly, US capitalism is not a monolith and even US corporations can be ‘persuaded’ to boycott a country if the pressure from their workers is sufficient. Lazare is clearly unaware of the three-year long strike at Dunnes Stores in Dublin by mainly female shop workers who refused to sell South African fruit. It was part and parcel of the move to the left of the shopworkers union IDATU. Just as he seems to be unaware of the refusal of Californian longshoremen to offload ships belonging to Israel’s Zim or the actions of Italian port workers.

BDS is not an appeal to imperialism’s better nature but to workers within the heart of the imperialist beast - a fact ignored by Lazare in the best traditions of left-sectarianism. It is proletarian internationalism.

Of course BDS will affect Israeli workers, but socialists ally themselves with the workers of the oppressed nation, even against workers in the oppressor group. It is not BDS which is a scab outfit but the disgraceful racist arguments of Lazare. No doubt the Jewish and working class boycott of Nazi Germany, which the Zionists also opposed, was a scab movement in the eyes of this left sectarian.

If Lazare knew anything about Israel he would know that it is the Israeli Jewish working class which is most hostile to the Palestinians. He says calls for Palestinian workers to withdraw from the Histadrut “is plainly to nip Arab-Jewish labour solidarity in the bud”. Lazare demonstrates nothing so much as his own ignorance. Histadrut was never a trade union. In the words of Golda Meir, it was a “great colonising agency”. Its former general secretary, Pinhas Lavon, went even further when he denied that Histadrut was a trade union. It was a “state in preparation”.

For its first 38 years, Histadrut refused admission to Arab workers and after that it kept them in a separate Arab section headed by a Jew. Histadrut it was which formed the Haganah terror group. Histadrut from its inception opposed joint Arab-Jewish working-class unity. There are joint Arab-Jewish workers organisations, such as Kav Laoved.

As early as 1922 the 4th Congress of the Communist International condemned, referring to Histadrut and others, the pseudo-socialist tendencies of some categories of well-paid European workers in the colonies. Settler colonialism in Israel, Australia and Canada saw alliances of European workers against the indigenous population. Lazare is, however, eager to rush to the support of the former in the name of socialism. This is crude workerism and has nothing to do with socialist internationalism.

I agree entirely with Moshé Machover and Djamil Lakhdar-Hamina in their criticisms of Lazare’s reactionary formulations. Lazare simply does not understand that national oppression is in itself a form of class oppression. No doubt he would have enthused about the Rand Rebellion of 1922, the general strike of South African miners in Witwatersrand, whose demand was for the maintenance of the colour bar. They marched to the slogan of “white workers of the world unite”!

Histadrut had, as its main demand, Jewish labour - ie, that Jewish employers should not employ Arabs. Yet Lazare has the impudence to describe Histadrut as a normal trade union, despite being the second major employer in Israel - until its industries were forced to privatise.

It is irrelevant that Norman Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein oppose BDS (in fact Finkelstein has gone very quiet on the subject). Chomsky still sees himself as some kind of Zionist and Finkelstein is no anti-Zionist. Neither of them are socialists, but that doesn’t stop Lazare summoning them in his aid.

Moshé Machover is quite correct to say that members of the oppressor group have no right to dictate to the oppressed how they must conduct their struggle. Socialists should advise and counsel, but in the final analysis the duty of socialists is to express solidarity with the demands of the oppressed. Yes, BDS will no doubt hurt the Israeli working class, but Palestinians are hurting far more. It is Israeli workers who are driving the bulldozers that demolish Palestinian homes. It is Israeli workers in uniform who are shooting Palestinian workers and their children. It is the height of arrogance and chauvinism for socialists to think that they can dictate to the oppressed what they can and cannot do.

Finally these debates should be conducted in a fraternal and comradely manner. To call the politics of Moshé Machover “plainly shallow, ill-informed and anti-working class” is both insulting and arrogant. I’m not aware that Lazare could hold a candle to the achievements of Moshé. Having known Moshé for many decades, anti-working class is not my impression of him. Lazare should retract his petty insults and apologise.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton