Letters

Genetic nonsense

Pete Gregson is plain and simply wrong about there being no genetic evidence to support the existence of a Jewish people as a distinct ethnic group (Letters, November 4).

In fact, the majority of credible scientific opinion is that there is remarkable consistency in the DNA of Jewish people around the world, which can indeed be traced back to an ancient and common Israelite population. Now I accept that genetics, the study of DNA, etc is still an evolving science. There are large sections of the human DNA which have not been decoded or understood by scientists.

But, actually, should those who describe themselves as scientific communists, Marxists or just anti-racists be bothered in the slightest about differences in DNA genetic material, where ancient peoples originated from or historical ‘rights’ to specific pieces of land? Of course not. We are all members of one human race and differences in DNA between us are literally as superficial - and should be as irrelevant - as differences in the colour of people’s skin, eyes or hair.

‘Historical right’ to land is an absurdity. Implicit in Gregson’s argument trying to assert the contrary is, if Jewish people could trace their genetics back to an ancient people, which at one stage in history was part of an original Israel, they would presumably then have a case for a historical right of return and to be part of the current state of Israel. So Gregson, by parroting quack science, inadvertently (?) supports the case of the Zionists.

By his arguments, should modern-day descendants of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings in Britain, genetically related to ancient ‘colonisers’, be treated as (unwelcome?) “guests”, to use his wording? Maybe the Ancient Britons and Celts were themselves “invaders” of an even older Britain and perhaps only descendants from the previous Stone Age populations are true British residents? But, as we know, even these too will have migrated from other parts of the world. In fact large parts of the histories of ancient peoples are constant migration. How far back into history should we go? But, again, having arguments based on genetics and movements of people over hundreds and thousands of years feels very anti-human and anti-socialist.

Gregson completely distorts the positions of the national liberation movement in South Africa, led by the African National Congress and South African Communist Party. They absolutely did not regard the white population as alien colonialists, who should be treated as overstaying “guests” by the black majority. Yes, over hundreds of years, white settlers had come to the region, colonised it and imposed a brutal, racially driven system of exploitation and oppression against the black majority population.

But the ANC-led national liberation movement and the anti-apartheid movement strongly held to the principles that, in the here and now, these were now established, settled and reproducing populations, who had as much right to live in the new South Africa as the black majority. The point was that neither (artificially constructed) ‘race’ should dominate the other; that they and all peoples should have equal rights. What was the alternative? That the whole white populations should be expelled and returned - to where? The Netherlands, the UK, other European countries? Perhaps confined to concentration camps? Or worse?

The same principles should apply to Israel/Palestine. Whatever the wrongs of Zionist colonisation of Palestine from the early 20th century, it is indisputable that there is now an established, settled and reproducing population there, whether it is labelled Israeli, Jewish, Hebrew or whatever. The majority of them are working class - ie, they have to sell their labour in order to live - and they are therefore our class sisters and brothers. They should have equal rights within a new Israel/Palestine alongside the Palestinian and Arab peoples who have been displaced and oppressed by the current state of Israel and its military occupations. This is the position of the secular Palestinian national liberation organisations and the grassroots formations and structures of the Palestinian resistance.

We have to proceed on the basis of current concrete realities and not be determined or even affected by genetics or movements of peoples over hundreds and thousands of years - both on the basis of principle and also in view of the potentially catastrophic humanitarian consequences which could follow if we don’t.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

DNA politics

Pete Gregson has taken a seriously mistaken view of Jews and genetics in general.

An Irish dance hall in London had a colour bar in the 1960s and they refused entry to a Mayo man because he had negro features. It was no good identifying his village of birth; and they ignored his accent and companions’ defence of him. Almost 400 years previously a ship from the Spanish Armada was wrecked off the west coast of Ireland, a black conscript from a Spanish colony swam ashore and married a local woman, his ancestors. Was he not really a Mayo man, then? Did his culture and environment not make him what he was?

I have not done a DNA test, but aggregated results from the south coast of Ireland identify Spain as the country of origin of a large percentage of that population, so they are not really Irish at all! So who are? The Celts, who mainly came from Britain, or the population before them who came from the Middle East (as we have learned from those archaeological sites)? Or the Norman conquerors of Ireland, who “became more Irish than the Irish themselves”, as James Connolly recounts in his book, The reconquest of Ireland?

So we are to believe that the Palestinians (including those who converted to Islam in the 9th century?) are the only real Jews, while white-skinned Jews from Kazakhstan and black- and brown-skinned Jews from Ethiopia, elsewhere in Africa and India who converted to Judaism a few thousand years ago are not real Jews at all, and so have no right to be in the state of Israel either. But the ancestors of the Islamic Palestinian Jews ethnically cleansed and intermarried with the Canaanites, who did the same to the earlier inhabitants, as archaeological discoveries have proved - to the embarrassment of the racist Zionist rulers of Israel.

Pete Gregson is moving into very dangerous territory here by ignoring culture and environment. A search for Aryan genetic purity was not the Nazi project, because the science had not developed at that point, but skull shape, blond hair and blue eyes had the same essence.

I repudiate his approach in the strongest terms and urge him to deal with the real world of culture and environment, plus the dialectical interaction between nature and nurture. Nations will not disappear after the world revolution, but will reject the reactionary aspects of their culture and promote the progressive music and dance, sport and literature that makes this diversity so appealing to socialists and so repulsive to the Tory Party and their far-right followers, not to mention outright fascists. So, the term ‘Jew’ does not simply mean a religion like Catholicism or Protestantism: it is also very strongly a cultural identification, forged by its diverse history, as explained so well by Abram Leon in The Jewish question: a Marxist interpretation. I saw a recent statement from a Jew who did not believe in a god, but who observed the annual Jewish customs. So a lapsed Catholic is not at all the same as a lapsed Jew, it seems. However, if you argue that the genetic approach applies to Zionism alone, you have defeated your own case.

The Zionist state of Israel for Jews alone is an apartheid state which must be overthrown and replaced by a workers’ state granting equal rights to all ethnicities amongst its inhabitants as part of a Middle East federation of workers’ states.

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Zionist support

I am a UK-born, Scottish-educated, secular Jewish, left-leaning Zionist immigrant to Israel, who is appalled - nay, devastated - by the way things have turned out in Israel.

However, in the Weekly Worker there is a most peculiar letter by one Pete Gregson. Most of his contributions are by any standards very odd. They almost exclusively advocate anti-Zionist, anti-Israel themes, and he campaigns to twin Edinburgh with Gaza, etc. I have never yet read anything by him that addresses issues of Marxism, capitalism and related matters as such. They may exist, but I do not find them prominent. His exclusionary focus is ferociously anti-Israel (not unlike Tony Greenstein, but weirder). This latest letter is so beyond rationality and so fundamentally dishonest that one wonders why the Weekly Worker finds a place for this sort of stuff (I understand that it is not indeed restricted to a closed thought system, but is in fact open to publishing a wide range of views, even from non-members of the CPGB, for which you have my respect).

Noting the failure of most anti-Zionist campaigns, Mr Gregson proposes attacking Zionism and Jews supporting Israel on the grounds that there is no genetic continuity between them and the geographic area of Israel. This, he claims, cuts the ground from under the fundamental justification for support for Zionism.

In this, Mr Gregson (and sadly much of the left) avoids one of the great truths underlying Zionism - it is one of the fixed, but often unspoken, historical truths of Jewish consciousness. It is this: life with ‘these people’ is impossible. They are horrible. We cannot beat them, we cannot change them, we have to get away from them or we will die. This truth stretches back into the mists of time (see ‘List of Jewish messiah claimants’ on Wikipedia).

It raises the question, ‘So? To where now?’ Many said America, France, Britain, South Africa, Australia - anywhere that will allow us to get away from these people! The Zionists - a tiny minority of those asking that oft-raised question at the end of the 19th century - said Palestine. In a sense, the reasons why they said so are not the main thrust for this discussion. But, of course, they looked to the Jewish religious culture in which reference to the land of Israel is so thoroughly embedded.

Certainly, much of Judaism accepts certain myths as absolute truth. Consider, please, the Friday night Sabbath Kiddush: Ki hoo yom tichela lmikreh kodesh, zecher l’yitziat Mitzraim (‘For it is the first of the holy convocations, in remembrance of departure from Egypt’). Eh? Departure from Egypt? There is not a shred of evidence that the people were slaves in Egypt, and left there. Nor the sojourn in Sinai. Similarly, the Passover story - a fundamental component of the Jewish people’s self-story - is not based on western-validated historical evidence.

So what is it? It is the people’s ‘self-story’ - the actual ‘genetic’ continuity of the Jewish people to the people of the Bible stories is completely irrelevant. Every people, in every nation, has developed a foundational story which is only very loosely connected to reality. (Here, may I recommend that readers watch at least the first five episodes of Timothy Snyder’s YouTube series of lectures on Ukraine. He explains this very well.)

Also, I do believe that Marx understood that people need a comforting story. He wrote: “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.” He was, of course, speaking not as a man of faith, but rather as a secular humanist. However, he does appear to suggest a largely positive role religion could play in an exploitative and alienating society. Hmmm.

Mr Gregson, having failed miserably to destroy the inbuilt religious and cultural sympathy of most of the Jewish people to the idea of Israel, now proposes to attack and destroy that connection - by attacking the mythical ‘genetic’ story! In support of this, he is organising an 18-location tour of the UK by rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a noted anti-Zionist. Significantly, and thoroughly dishonestly, he fails to mention that rabbi Weiss is the leader of a cult calling themselves ‘Neturei Karta’ - possibly the most extreme, fanatic, cultic sub-group of Jews in the world. Being a groupuscule derivative of Latvian ultra-orthodox Jewry, they see themselves as fully justified in returning to Israel only when the messiah comes.

The questions I ask are:

How is it that these Latvian Jews are genetically acceptable as Holy Land returnees to Mr Gregson, but other Latvian Jews (like me) are not?
Why is Mr Gregson - a person who presents himself as a modern Marxist - comfortable reaching out to some of the most fundamentalist, religious weirdo fanatics in the world?
What target audience does Mr Gregson think will be influenced by the views of a rabbi from Neturei Karta?
Who is funding this 18-location tour of the UK?

John Davidson
Israel

Elephant

Paul Demarty - apart from repeatedly telling us how young the Just Stop Oil protestors were, as if these were toddlers let loose in the kitchen - actually avoids the elephant in the vacuous room of their logic (‘Art attack’, October 20).

Let me begin by saying that supporting the ‘right to protest’ doesn’t mean I have to follow the instructions, impositions or imperatives of the person protesting. I support ‘the right’ of religious freedom, but that doesn’t mean I have to pray to whatever magic pixie someone believes in, or respect a view they have that I hold to be nonsense.

I for many decades now have been a vegan - I do not believe in the exploitation or death of animals, which means I do not exploit or cause the death of animals. I was unable to have the Covid vaccine for that reason and, despite now being in a vulnerable capacity, I risked my old life for the sake of that principle. That doesn’t mean I prevent non-vegans from eating at their choice of café or meal from the menu. I didn’t stop drinking milk because some fool had glued themselves to the milkman’s float and I couldn’t get any. I decided that the ethics and principles of veganism were right, so I chose to stop using dairy products.

Now let’s look at the behaviour of the Just Stop Oil protestors. Do they in fact not use oil? Do they refuse to use any product made using oil? No, in fact they use oil every single day of their lives and make no effort whatsoever not to. Their plastic bibs, banners, trainers, mobile phones, electronic devices, and the cars and public transport they use are all made or run using oil. The renewables they advocate all operate using oil (and incidentally coal) to make the steel. Many of them drive to the protest, park their own cars then blockade everyone else’s. This is an odd ‘principle’, is it not? It would be like me not actually becoming a vegan, tucking into a full meaty and eggy English breakfast before sticking myself to McDonald’s entrance to stop everyone else eating animals.

Whether I respect a protest, and feel myself obliged to sit there and follow someone else’s agenda for the day rather than my own, will frankly be determined by how logical and productive the protest is. Just Stop Oil is neither. It’s classic ‘Do as I say and not as I do’.

David Douglass
South Shields

Dreadful

I always enjoy reading Paul Demarty. He has a turn of phrase that raises the level of reading to fun (even if I don’t understand everything!).

One line in his article last week, however, raised something else in me, as a partially retired teacher of history. He asks: “Can American education be so dreadful that all this stuff is absent?” (‘Buyer’s remorse’, November 3). The quality and quantity of history teaching has been a subject I’ve studied all my working life, both in the US and here, and the answer, unfortunately is ‘yes’. True, the students may study the depression, but what do they actually learn?

I’ve heard a great deal from British people about how awful American education is. Well, it depends on which state one teaches in. Since, as everybody knows (and as discussed ad nauseum by a writer I won’t name), everything not mentioned in the constitution is the state’s responsibility. That’s fine, except that, firstly, textbooks are published nationally, but the state that buys the most textbooks often gets their way in what is taught. So the Alamo is treated very differently in Texas than in New York, but the textbook is the same - mostly biased towards which state shouts the loudest or buys the most books. Secondly, in some states and local areas the parent association has a great deal of power in what is read, what is taught and what teachers are allowed to teach (anyone who has seen the movie Field of dreams will know what I mean). And the main question is: what do teenagers get from what they read?

I did my dissertation on whether teenagers see themselves as part of history. I always felt a part of the passing of time, because my grandparents talked to me about living under the tsar and how they survived pogroms, and my uncle described in some detail the reasons for the Spanish Civil War’s outcome. I always saw myself as part of an era - not on my own, starting from nothing.

But I discovered that even most African-American children know very little about what their parents and grandparents went through prior to and during the civil rights movement. Yes, they know about slavery and the ‘Underground Railroad’, but not about ‘Reconstruction’ and the fightback against it.

In five countries where I circulated a questionnaire, only one had young people who virtually all said the same thing: the Easter Rising of 1916 was the one episode that they felt most proud of - and when I visited Ireland, I understood why. History is a living project in Ireland. If you are fortunate enough to know some young people, they will show you with some pride where the illegal Irish language classes were held under the noses of those nasty British, or why a particular statue is where it is.

American high school students (in a predominantly black and Hispanic school) did mention slavery, but different aspects of it. One young lady wrote: “I’m always worried about slavery, because I’m afraid they are going to come back and do it to me.” Who are “they”? How could they “come back”?

For the most part, young people are cut off from history - they are taught it relatively dryly and without much explanation. And, so that the English don’t feel too superior, what is the reason for having two years of GCSE history, where students study four modules which may have little or no relation to each other? Hitler and World War II have been ‘sexy’ for a few years now, but then students may also study the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and Queen Elizabeth I! How do students have any idea of the sweep of history?

I have spent much time explaining how Hitler came to power in the first place. Most students study either World War I or World War II, but not both. It’s up to a teacher who knows (and many who are young and just starting out don’t know) how to connect them - and how to add art and music or give aspects of films that represent them: for example, parts of the Wizard of Oz and the gold standard arguments. American history curricula at least cover the whole spectrum, even if shallowly. There was one curriculum I saw in the States that blended area studies with art, music and drama. Brilliant. But too expensive for most schools (teachers would have to be retrained and the schools wouldn’t give them the time). The lesson about colonisation was worthwhile in itself. It got students doing things - acting, working in groups and reading and writing. A perfect combination.

So, Paul, I’m afraid the whole question about the teaching of history is a complex and, unfortunately for this history teacher, a pessimistic one. After the revolution, comrades, I’m first in line to redesign my part of the curriculum!

Gaby Rubin
London

Not political?

Mick Lynch is being hailed as a hero by many on the left for his response on a GB News interview claiming industrial action isn’t political. Typical of the comments are: “He made them look like halfwits and he’s a great example of logic and reason!” Of course it’s political. Capitalism is political, the companies’ actions are political, the response from trade unions is political. The interviewer is political and their questions are political.

Would it really be that difficult for Mick Lynch to say, ‘The economy is competitive. My job and agenda is to win better pay and conditions for the workers I represent. Your agenda, that of the government and the companies, is the opposite: to increase shareholder value at the expense of workers.’

We are getting to that time of year again when we’ll see lots of social media posts claiming wearing a poppy isn’t political. War isn’t political either - well, at least imperial wars. I’m sure they believe civil wars and revolutions, when the working class fight the ruling class for rights and freedoms, are political. What they actually mean is everyone should agree with them. It’s an attempt to silence free speech.

Weather vane Andy Burnham showed what’s wrong with Labour when he said the problem with cladding was due to lack of regulation, and all governments were responsible. All neoliberal governments - my word! The idiot then said it wasn’t political. Deregulation - one of the main features of neoliberalism (Thatcherism) - isn’t political! No wonder the electorate had no idea why socialists warned of the dangers of unregulated financial markets and that health and safety wasn’t red tape. No idea why Corbyn was elected leader, why Labour moved to the left, why hundreds of thousands joined the Labour Party and Labour became the largest party in Europe. No idea why Corbyn’s socialist Labour was better than Blair’s Thatcherite New Labour. No idea why we’ve suffered decades of neoliberalism. It’s an extreme ideology and has been a disaster.

Of course, we all know he means it’s not party political. But that’s the point - consensus and neoliberal hegemony is the absence of politics and lack of open debate and understanding.

Yes, there’s fighting talk from Mick Lynch, but it’s devoid of serious politics.

Roger Day
Gravesend

Better offer?

We ought now to be free of the views of those who have monopolised economic commentary for 40 years, yet who were deposed from government in six weeks by horrified money markets for which they had presumed to speak, but of which they had known nothing.

Alas, though, Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-budget ever been put to a Commons division, then Labour’s whipped abstention would have saved Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Labour is the only party that still thinks Trussonomics was a good idea.

Keir Starmer versus Rishi Sunak will result in a hung parliament. We need to hold the balance of power - ie, those of us who seek to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

David Lindsay
North West Durham candidate 2024