Letters

Anti-Semitism?

I wish to take issue with Mike Macnair’s article, which suggests David Miller is blaming the Jews for the crimes of US imperialism (‘Anti-Semitism of useful idiots’. August 31). This is about UK and US support for Israel, of course.

It rather feels that Macnair is unwilling to consider that Jews and Zionism are related: he considers the evils of Israel are entirely down to the Yanks, with Jews as unwitting pawns in their battle for world domination. As far as he can tell, Jewish power has nothing to do with the success of Israel. Note it’s been said that it’s safer to criticise Israel in Israel than it is in the UK. Now why is that? Is it the evil Tories and the Labour right that we must blame for the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism?

In fact, who is behind the hate mail I receive? Who was it that got me expelled from the GMB union for criticising Israel? GMB insiders tell me it was down to Rhea Wolfson, leading light of the Jewish Labour Movement, ex-Labour NEC and currently the GMB’s international officer. According to Mr Macnair, she can only be in the pay of the US government … And her claim to be a Jew laid low by my hurtful comments on Israel is entirely unrelated to the charge of anti-Semitism she had Gary Smith lay before me? Indeed, I have Jewish friends who say they must support Israel, because where else can they go, should the Brits turn against them? So one might surmise that it is Jews that want Israel - not necessarily the Americans; the Americans gave their support to the Zionist project rather late in the day - Israel was pretty much fully formed before the Americans chose to support it.

But, according to Mike Macnair, this is all meaningless - for it is US imperialism that oppresses the Palestinians - it is nothing to do with Jews at all. Why - even to mention this, will mark me as a “useful idiot” in Macnair’s book.

Whilst he criticises veteran Jewish campaigner Tony Greenstein for supporting David Miller, let us note what Tony himself says on this matter: “Jews are not an oppressed minority - they are overwhelmingly middle class.”

Let us recall what David Miller tweeted:

“(1) Jews are not discriminated against. (2) They are over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power. (3) They are therefore, in a position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.”

As we all know, Jewish Voice for Labour did not like this. They declared on August 9 that Miller had “crossed the line”. They viewed his words as “overstatements at best, flattening and homogenising Jews, ignoring any historical, international or social context and creating an impression of Jews exercising power as a cohesive force. Many were distressed by some of Miller’s statements in the past, which seemed to exaggerate Israeli power, but we believed they fell within the terrain of academic freedom. This recent tweet, focusing on Jews, is of a different order and has crossed a line.”

Macnair thinks Israel exists because the UK and US created it and support it. If only it were so simple! Key players in declaring that anti-Semitism exists (when it does not) are the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Community Security Trust, the Jewish Labour Movement, Hope Not Hate (a misnomer!), Labour Against Antisemitism, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the three Jewish newspapers (Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News, Jewish Telegraph), UK Lawyers for Israel, Friends of Israel, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre - and, of course, the Israeli government.

What do all these groups have in common? It is estimated that 70% of the UK’s 300,000 Jews support Israel (but are they all really ‘Jews’ for most of them have rejected their Torah and Talmud …?). However, they abuse their claim to Jewishness in their determination to protect their racist colony.

It is interesting that I was expelled from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for saying pretty much the same thing as David Miller. Like JVL, PSC is run by folk calling themselves Jews (even though they have a Palestinian employee). They took great issue with me for saying:

“There is anti-Semitism in the UK because, I think, the Jews have so much leverage here. And they clearly do, as the most outspoken ones - those in support of Israel, the Zionists - have shown. They have exerted considerable leverage on the UK’s political parties, the police, the schools and universities, the local authorities to adopt the IHRA - and has it made the Jews safer?

“Not at all. But it does indicate the Jews in the UK (that with 370,000 or 0.5% of the population) generally wield significant influence.”

PSC declared I had made an anti-Semitic statement and they continue to decry me. In April, they wrote to all PSC regional groups instructing them to boycott the ‘Muslim and Jew: beyond Israel’ tour I had organised to 15 cities. By so doing, they were assisting the Zionists, who were also trying to do the same thing. I have come to the view that the PSC care more about cosseting Jews and maintaining “benevolent Zionism” than saving Palestine and dismantling Israel. They support Palestine, it’s true, but they seem to believe Jews have a right to Israel too.

Readers may wonder why David Miller and I feel the need to say anything about Jews. Well, the fact of the matter is that we have both been persecuted by people identifying as Jews for criticising Israel. And we know that the power of the Israel lobby in the UK is great. And we know that it is driven by people who think themselves Jewish. But it’s clear that neither David nor I are anti-Semitic - neither of us are displaying “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people” (the OED definition). We are simply making an observation. We feel a need to challenge the prevailing narrative.

Folk make less than glowing observations about the Scots (‘mean with their money’); Irish (‘potato-loving drunkards’); English (‘stiff-upper-lip xenophobes’); Catholics (pope-loving Mary-worshippers); Protestants (Catholic-haters), etc, but if an observation is made about Jews that contradicts their claim to be perpetual victims, excluded from power and endlessly discriminated against, all hell breaks loose and we see anti-Zionist and Zionist Jews suddenly holding hands, campaigning jointly to exclude us from the struggle for Palestine.

Can I reiterate, this letter is not about attacking Jews. It is about supporting a fellow campaigner for Palestine, who is under attack for commenting that Jews in the UK are not disenfranchised and those that support Israel (ie, 70% of them) are enthusiastic about abusing their influence in furtherance of Zionism, by deplatforming and smearing all who oppose them as Jew-haters.

One of our Palestinian members has told me this letter is worthwhile, because she has been victimised (like Miller) here in the UK by Zionists - who were claiming to be Jewish. She is but one of the 3,000 Palestinians in the UK who think themselves on a shaky peg. Should the UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) call for their citizenship rights to be removed, their call will be supported by others in the establishment claiming to be Jews. And the UKLFI are run by … who? Well, it’s certainly not US imperialists.

If Mike Macnair still believes Israel was created by US imperialism, he should consult Alan Hart’s brilliant book Zionism - the real enemy of the Jews. He’ll read how the USA originally refused to support the Zionist takeover of Palestine and actually sided with the Arabs. All that changed in 1947, when Zionist Jews in the USA started flexing their media and financial muscles. Harry S Truman was in favour of issuing 400,000 visas to the Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps, so that they could come to the USA. The Zionists were furious, because they wanted to send them to Palestine.

Truman was told that if he continued he would never be elected president again (see chapter 11: ‘President Truman surrenders to Zionism’). He dropped the visa plan. So the camp survivors were pushed by Zionists who chartered boats, often without visas, to Palestine - and there went on to form the backbone of the Hagganah, showing no mercy in the Nakba.

Then, when they wanted to declare Israel, Zionist pressure again forced the US to support the UN Partition Plan. Then Truman won in 1948, thanks to Zionist Jews supporting him. Since then, no US president has risked alienating the Zionists.

Pete Gregson
One Democratic Palestine

Horrible hacks

David Miller has been targeted for the sack for political reasons by the mainstream of the ruling class, who concur with the Zionists that he should be eliminated from academia, because of his sharp and meaningful criticisms and exposure of a form of racism that has overwhelming ruling class support. His recent denunciation by Jewish Voice for Labour is another terrible example of how solidarity in the face of attacks by the class enemy is undone by political softness on Zionism on the left.

In raising the issue of the disproportionate representation of bourgeois Jews in the ruling class, he is following in the footsteps of a number of leftwing, anti-Zionist activists, including myself and later Norman Finkelstein, who have put this in statistical form and attempted to discuss its implications in a rational, socialist manner.

Finkelstein in his 2018 essay Corbyn mania, in the context of the huge role of the Zionist lobby in destroying the Corbyn movement, offered the best breakdown of this:

“The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only 0.5% of the population but fully 20% of the 100 richest Brits. Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated and professionally successful … Jews are incomparably organised, as they have created a plethora of interlocking, overlapping and mutually reinforcing communal and defence organisations that operate in both the domestic and international arenas. In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government … The wonder would be if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power.”

He concludes his statistical survey by remarking: “It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts.”

Denying and suppressing these crucial socioeconomic facts is exactly the attitude of many on the left that capitulate to Zionism.

Alex Callinicos’s Socialist Workers Party issued its own awful statement which began by stating that “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Saying Jews are ‘over-represented’ in positions of power is.” This wretched, opportunist organisation has form for joining in Zionist witch-hunts. Callinicos denounced Norman Finkelstein in 1999 for coming “dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts” with his famous work The holocaust industry. Today it includes Zionists in its Stand Up to Racism initiative - particularly in Scotland, with a standing invitation to Glasgow Friends of Israel to its events, to the outrage of Palestine activists.

Now the centrist, Islamophobic and soft pro-Zionist CPGB has jumped on the bandwagon, in a hypocritical, ignorant and two-faced article by Mike Macnair, which agrees with the SWP that Miller uses “really anti-Semitic arguments” and that David’s words “lump together all Jews without any recognition of class or other differences. Miller targets Jews, not the actual ruling class, and plays on the idea of Jews as ultra-rich and manipulative.”

A pack of lies! Miller does not ‘target’ Jews. He cites facts about their disproportionate representation in positions of power, which actually puts them in a similar position to white Anglo-Saxons, in Britain, the US and other Anglo-dominated imperialist countries. He says nothing about Jews being “manipulative”. These are lies pulled out of the author’s bottom. Miller quite correctly refuses to accept the widely propagated myth that Jews are today oppressed as a people in a world dominated by imperialism, and cites the material facts that prove it.

Macnair writes, in a polemic against Tony Greenstein (whose recent leftward movement is precisely shown in his defence of David Miller, contrary to his denunciations of myself and Gerry Downing in the past): “But rather than defend Miller’s right to free speech, even if what he says is crap, comrade Greenstein goes on to argue with the highest degree of artificiality that Miller’s tweet’s focus on Jews being ‘over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of cultural, economic and political power’ is not anti-Semitic because it is statistically true. Well, yes. But would you make the same complaint about Jews being ‘over-represented’ in post-revolutionary Soviet government or the Red Army? The ‘over-represented’ claim is classically anti-Semitic.”

This just shows what anti-Marxist cretins the CPGB leadership - centred around the political coward and charlatan, Jack Conrad - actually are. Macnair admits that David Miller has got his facts right. “Well, yes,” he coyly concedes. But he follows that up with an amalgam that could have been concocted by the ‘Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’ or the forgers that put together the lies about ‘Trotsky-fascism’ at the Moscow Trials.

David Miller was talking about the situation today, not pre-revolutionary Russia, when Jews flocked to the revolutionary movement because of their oppression under the virulently anti-Semitic tsarist regime. Macnair is deliberately lying and smearing Miller here by dragging in circumstances and happenings that are economically and politically light years away from the current context. He is consciously smearing David Miller like those who tried to smear Lenin as a German agent in 1917, or Trotsky as pro-fascist in the 1930s.

The same hackery was used against myself in 2014 when I wrote my ‘Draft theses on the Jews and modern imperialism’, which cited the same facts. I was purged from the CPGB-allied Communist Platform in Left Unity by these third-campist Islamophobes. Weekly Worker editor/hack Peter Manson indulged in similar smearing.

Manson noted that I had quoted statistics from the pro-Zionist source Jewish World Review that boasted that “‘between 40% and 48%’ [In the US] of billionaires are Jews”. And he then ranted: “In my opinion, such ‘statistics’ say far more about the person quoting them than the people they claim to study. Even if we accept that those figures are accurate (a big ‘if’), then why would anyone consider them to be pertinent?” (‘No place for anti-Semitism’, September 18 2014).

He made his similar Stalinist innuendo explicit: “Interestingly, Donovan notes that communist organisations, not least the Bolsheviks, have often featured a high proportion of Jews amongst their leaders, yet he draws no parallel anti-Semitic conclusions about the significance of this (the Nazis were more consistent in this regard, it has to be said).”

So why would Norman Finkelstein consider these facts to be ‘pertinent’? He certainly made considerable use of them. He noted that “it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts”. The attitude of the CPGB’s hacks is precisely to seek to suppress discussion of these facts, and to smear anyone who does seek a proper discussion of them as effectively Nazis.

But they didn’t dare to smear Norman Finklestein as a Nazi: for the simple reason that he is possibly the best known Jewish anti-Zionist scholar in the world, and the son of survivors of the Nazi holocaust. He would have skinned them alive if they had, as he did to the liars and witch-hunters in the Labour Party, Hodge and co.

This is why Macnair’s denunciation of JVL for saying that Miller’s remarks “crossed a line” and are indulging in ‘cancel culture’ is so grotesquely hypocritical. What does he expect JVL to do, once the CPGB concur with them that David Miller is ‘anti-Semitic’? Invite him to tea and a slap-up meal? The CPGB say that free speech for fascists is something to be defended as a matter of principle. And they make a pseudo-show of criticising others on the left for demurring from this, having Nazi-baited David Miller in classic Stalinist fashion.

They drag in sensitive and complex questions involving transsexuals and the fears of ‘gender-critical’ types of predators exploiting trans rights, etc. Which are only distantly related to the question of ‘free speech’ for fascists and have their own autonomous level of complexity. But any issue will do to muddy the waters and excuse their Islamophobia, which refuses to defend the resistance of Muslim people in Iraq, Iran and Palestine against imperialist and Zionist invasions and terror. During the Iraq war, they made a polemical point of honour of refusing to defend Iraqi resistance against the US/UK invasion. Likewise, they refuse to defend Iran against imperialism. They refused to defend the elected Hamas government in the Palestinian territories against the coup that Abbas and Israel organised to overrule the elected expression of the Palestinian people in 2007. They refuse to defend the self-determination of Muslim peoples attacked by imperialism. Their neutral position on Ukraine - and refusal to defend the Donbass people targeted by imperialism and their Nazi Ukrainian puppets - is another manifestation of the same approach.

The CPGB’s methodology on questions involving Zionism and Jews is driven by racist philo-Semitism. Norman Finkelstein escapes censure for citing the same set of “critical socioeconomic facts” that others, such as David Miller, Gerry Downing and myself, were smeared as “anti-Semites” and akin to Nazis for citing. The reason for the difference in such treatment is evidently racialised. Non-Jews are not allowed to cite these socio-economic facts: Jews are so tolerated. This is racism similar to that of the Zionists, and reflects the CPGB’s soft-Zionist politics, that meant that in the early 2000s they were pursuing fusion discussions with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, on the basis of a common defence of ‘two states’ and the Zionist ‘right to self-determination’.

Their leaders are conscious charlatans and liars - particularly the cult leader at the top of the pile, Jack Conrad, who instigated my purge from the Communist Platform in 2014. In informal discussion in a London pub prior to my purge, in the presence of another CPGB member, Daniel Harvey, Conrad made it clear that he did not believe that my position was ‘anti-Semitic’ at all. But he feared that if the CPGB allowed me to fight for these views within their framework, they would be branded as ‘anti-Semitic’. Therefore, I had to go. “Call me a coward if you like,” he said, in private. Well, I will call him far worse - a cowardly, pseudo-Marxist charlatan, who doesn’t give a damn about the oppression of the Palestinians. The only time the CPGB ever turn up at Palestine demonstrations is when they can make money by flogging badges for their annual fundraising ‘Summer Offensive’. Barring that, they are notable by their absence.

Ian Donovan
Consistent Democrats

Tail and dog

We agree with the statement of Jewish Voice for Labour and also with the SWP’s objection that Miller: “lump(s) together all Jews without any recognition of class or other differences. Miller targets Jews, not the actual ruling class, and plays on the idea of Jews as ultra-rich and manipulative.”

In his article Mike Macnair sets the correct context for the debate - the machinations of US imperialism internationally - in the first half of the article. But Mike then goes on to defend Miller on the basis of his right to free speech and condemn ‘cancel culture’, which we think seriously undermines the identification of the main enemy in the first half. No platforming for fascists is standard leftist practice and just because we are not yet threatened with it does not mean we should take a libertarian view of what it is. Similarly, Tony Greenstein has lost his focus by identifying Zionism as the main enemy.

I have seen Pete Gregson’s letter to the Weekly Worker, with which I disagreed on the same basis: I wrote: “The USA is the global, hegemonic imperialist power and Israel is its aircraft carrier in the Middle East. It certainly is not the other way around - the tail does not wag the dog.” Peter responded, basically asserting that the tail does indeed wag the dog and ‘the Jews’ do indeed dominate US politics.

We should mention that the motivation for the demonisation of Corbyn by the Zionists and the British mass media and establishment in general was not primarily to assist the Zionist state of Israel in attacking the Palestinians, but to protect British capitalism and the Labour Party as a fall-back against a discredited Tory Party, when Corby’s election as leader caused a huge surge in support for the perceived sharp turn to the left in British working class politics. With half a million members, it was the biggest political party in Europe. However Corbyn was unable to promote this surge, seeking to placate his worst enemies and throwing his strongest supporters under the bus.

It is not true that the holocaust and fascism is simply history and Jews have no cause to worry about a repeat. A survey by the Anti-Defamation League in May of this year found that over a third of people in Hungary, Poland and Ukraine have “extensive” anti-Semitic beliefs. Remember the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting of October 27 2018, in which 11 Jews were killed and six wounded - the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States. The Proud Boys are explicitly anti-Semitic and Donald Trump, despite his Jewish son-in-law and Jewish-raised grandchildren, has made explicit anti-Semitic statements.

Jews have legitimate fears of another Trump presidency. In September 2020 Trump said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s gotta do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a rightwing problem: this is a leftwing problem.”

Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight

Not be said

For the people who fought in 1948, when they considered war, what was their context of how wars are fought? What was the Arab vision for action, should they be successful?

What is the unsaid difference between Arab refugees of 1947‑49 and the Jewish refugees from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, etc, etc, in the context of their times? What must not be said is that the Arabs of southern Syria/Mandatory Palestine were expelled/fled/dispossessed from a place of war. What must not be said is that the Jews were expelled/fled/dispossessed not from places of war after the war, far far away, was over.

What must not be said about the fate of the Arabs of 1947-49? That the Arab powers that were (and still are) did not offer them an integration route, in contrast with the early and very poor Israel. What must not be said about the ‘borders’ of pre-67 Israel? That in every case, at Arab insistence, not a single ceasefire line was to be considered as a ‘border’ in the Rhodes agreements. They are defined, at Arab insistence, as to be without any sense of permanent state borders. (Really! Go look them up.) What should not be said is that there is no such thing as a ‘67 border’. What should not be heard is the reasoning behind the demand to return to it.

There is currently a rise in inter-Arab violence in Israel. Loud and condemnatory. But there is no public voice hinting that, to solve murders, some collaboration with the police is necessary. Such things are not to be said.

It is comforting to see that the traditional obsession with ‘anti-Semitism’ is still here, like poking with your tongue at an abscessed tooth. Shalom, Marxists. We pinkish, liberal, elitist, nearly secular citizens of Israel have been demonstrating for near two thirds of a year against the policies and personnel of our government. The summer heat and humidity have been seriously brutal. Yet people walked in that clime from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - four days! - in our thousands and thousands. Every road crossing and thoroughfare has seen demonstrations every week.

And yet not a comment, nary a reference, not even a scathing denunciation from the left. Even the most pathetic turnout of crummy fascists usually gets some kind of dismissive sneer from Marxist circles. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

John Davidson
Givat Ada, Israel

Ditch Leninism

Andrew Northall in reply to Paul B Smith is ardent on the need to build the Communist Party, by which I presume he means the CPB (Letters, August 31). But the comrade, and communists in general, needs to address serious ideological questions in the light of the collapse of the Soviet Union 32 years ago. The left in general has failed to do this - both those who defend Trotsky and Stalin uncritically.

The first thing that communists need to do is to ask some fundamental questions following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These questions relate to both Marxism and Leninism. Some of these questions are:

How was it possible for someone like Lenin, who started out as an advocate of democratic socialism, to end up becoming the father of the world’s first modern totalitarian regime - which provided a model for Mussolini, and through him, Hitler, as even Trotsky later acknowledged?

Why did Trotsky, who played an important role in the establishment of Leninist totalitarianism, following the suppression of factions in the Communist Party at the 10th Congress in 1921, later develop a mythology, widely accepted by Trotskyists, that there was some golden age of Leninism, and that it was Stalin who came along and spoiled everything?

Why was Marx so easily misled by Blanqui on the question of a dictatorship, viewing it as necessary for the defence of socialism, although no mention is made of dictatorship in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, regardless of which, Lenin turned it into the very essence of Marxism?

Why did Marx and Marxism fail to grasp the significance of the energy revolution, based on fossil fuels, in the creation of modern industrial society, and the consequences for society when these sources of energy begin to deplete, and how this will contribute to shaping the process of socialist change?

Where does the communist movement stand now in matters of philosophy regarding the Marxist claim that ‘being’ determines consciousness? - a question especially relevant today in view of the swift loss of power by the communists in the Soviet Union, with no mass opposition to counterrevolution.

Finally, should we not be discussing the need to return to democratic socialism, while leaving behind the mistakes of Marxism-Leninism

Some communists will no doubt shy away from addressing these questions, preferring to keep their political blindfolds on, but these questions need to be addressed if communism wants to remain relevant to society.

The meaning of the collapse of the Soviet Union is clear: the choice we face is Marxism-Leninism or democratic socialism. Returning to Leninist totalitarianism is not the way forward, but it appears that most people in the communist movement don’t seem to have grasped this.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism