21.09.2023

Elephant in the room

It is Zionism, not anti-Zionism, that is joined to anti-Semitism. Tony Greenstein calls out the CPB’s resident Zionist, Mary Davis

At first sight it is strange that the Communist Party of Britain, which claims to support the Palestinians, should carry an article repeating the hoary old Zionist smear that anti-Zionism leads to anti-Semitism.

Mary Davis’s ‘The contested relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism’ (Communist Review No 108, summer 2023) is an exercise in obfuscation and dishonesty, not least because it attempts to present Zionism as some kind of national movement of the Jews (or even western Jews) that sought to fight anti-Semitism and racism.

Some inconvenient facts Davis chose to ignore:

•  Zionism formed alliances with and befriended anti-Semites.
•  Zionism was a racial nationalist movement that sought an alliance with imperialism.
•  Zionism was supported by only a small minority of Jews before the holocaust. If any group could be considered a Jewish national movement, it was the Bund, which operated over an identifiable territory: the ‘Pale of Settlement’ in eastern Europe, with its Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Colonisation

Davis paints, with a broad brush, the history of Zionist colonisation in Palestine, but amazingly fails to mention the Nakba - the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. We are given a saccharine version of history, whereby the Yishuv (the Jewish community) “sometimes, although by no means always, co-existed relatively peacefully with the indigenous Arab population”. That is it.

The first aliyah (wave of immigration) in 1882 was a traditional form of colonisation, in which Arabs were employed in the colonies, whilst continuing to live on the land. These were the colonies of Barons Edmond de Rothschild and, after his death in 1896, Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonisation Association - then later the Palestinian Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA). They were not Zionist.

The second Labour Zionist aliyah (1904-14), was the beginning of Zionist settlement. The policy of Jewish Labour, (Boycott of Arab Labour), was at its heart. David HaCohen, a leader of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) and a member of the Knesset for many years, explained:

I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut [General Federation of Jewish Labour]; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there ... To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; … to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land - to buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, god forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild, the incarnation of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him the “benefactor” - to do all that was not easy (Ha’aretz November 15 1969).

The best analysis of Zionist colonisation was contained in the 1930 report of Sir John Hope-Simpson, in the wake of the 1929 riots:

… the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund [JNF] has been that land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the JNF, he is deprived forever from employment on that land. … The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation [ZO] deliberately adopted.¹

Davis criticises “the blanket identification of Zionism with racism, apartheid, colonialism and worse”, and lectures the reader that “moral judgements … must not be allowed to obscure an analysis of the Zionist movement”. Unfortunately Davis is guilty of the very crime that she ascribes to others.

From its inception at the end of the 19th century, Zionism saw itself as a colonial movement. In January 1902 Theodor Herzl, its founder, described a letter he had written to Cecil Rhodes, the white supremacist leader in southern Africa:

How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial, and because it presupposes understanding of a development which will take 20 or 30 years … But you, Mr Rhodes, are a visionary politician or a practical visionary. You have already demonstrated this. And what I want you to do is … to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan …²

Today, when colonialism has gone out of fashion, the Zionist movement disavows its colonial roots. However, when it was in fashion, the ZO had a ‘Colonisation Department’.³

David Ben Gurion, chair of Mapai and Israel’s first prime minister, regularly referred to the settlements as “colonies”. For all her bluster and waffle, Davis cannot deny the fact that the Zionist movement saw itself as a settler-colonial movement. As we can see from the Hope-Simpson report, racism was integral to Zionist colonisation.

Apartheid

Davis is at pains to infer that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have much in common and that the former leads to the latter. She tells us that anti-Zionism “per se is not anti-Semitic”. However, “there is currently a strain of anti-Zionism … which has normalised hostility to Israel as a Zionist entity founded by Jews”. This apparently “can and often does lead to anti-Semitism”.

Despite the efforts of the Zionists to redefine anti-Semitism as hostility not to Jews, but to Zionism and Israel, Davis does not once mention the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of anti-Semitism.

Why does she argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic? Firstly, “because it singles out Israel for special treatment”; and, secondly, because “questioning the existence of the state of Israel ignores the motivation for its foundation as a refuge for Jews …” This argument about ‘singling out’ Israel for criticism echoes the complaints of supporters of apartheid in South Africa, who were keen to point to the iniquities of surrounding countries, as if that was any kind of justification. Apartheid South Africa was founded as a refuge for the Afrikaners and the USA was a refuge for Christian dissenters. It is irrelevant why a state was founded. What matters is what it does.

Nor was Israel founded in order to save the victims of anti-Semitism from persecution. Chaim Weizmann said in 1919: “Alas, Zionism can’t provide a solution for catastrophes.” Palestine was closed to thousands of survivors of the Ukrainian pogroms in the early 1920s.⁴ Gur Alroey described how Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, “preferred productive immigrants over needy refugees and thought the land of Israel needed strong, healthy immigrants, not refugees weak in body and spirit”. ⁵

Rabbi Abba Hillel-Silver, president of the Zionist Organisation of America, asked:

Are we again, in moments of desperation, going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to defeat Zionism? ... Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the Second World War, nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe, ... Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.⁶

The Zionist movement opposed the rescue of Jews from the Nazis to any country bar Palestine. After Kristallnacht (the Nazi pogrom in November 1938), Britain agreed to admit 10,000 children (the Kindertransport). The Zionist leadership was furious. Ben Gurion told Mapai’s central committee on December 9 1938:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.⁷

A week later, on December 17 1938, Ben Gurion wrote a memo to the Zionist Executive expressing his fears that:

If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps, on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine, on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people’s entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America, but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism’s very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.⁸

A Jewish state was founded not in order to rescue individual Jews, but in order to perpetuate the Jewish nation/race. That was the basis of the cordial relationship between the Nazis and the Zionists during the 1930s. How else to explain the fact that the German Zionist Federation (ZVfD) pressurised the Gestapo not to allow Jews to emigrate to countries other than Palestine? The Gestapo “did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine”.⁹

When Franklin D Roosevelt called the Evian Conference to discuss Europe’s Jewish refugees, the Zionists were appalled. A meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) in June 1938 decided to

belittle the [Evian] conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing ... We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organisations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts.¹⁰

Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the JAE on June 26 1938 explained: “No rationalisations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.”¹¹ Menachem Ussishkin at the same meeting said that

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him … The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration.¹²

The Zionist leaders welcomed the rise of the Nazis to government. It vindicated everything they had said about the impossibility of Jews living amongst non-Jews. Zionist leaders saw the Hitler regime as a golden opportunity to prosper.¹³ Francis Nicosia spoke of the “illusory assumption” that Zionism “must have been well served by a Nazi victory”. Hitler’s victory “could only bolster Zionist fortunes”. Nicosia also spoke of the tendency to “view Zionist interests as distinct from those of the larger Jewish community in the diaspora”. ¹⁴

So positive was its assessment of the situation that, as early as April 1933, the ZVfD announced its determination to take advantage of the crisis to win over the traditionally assimilationist German Jewry to Zionism ¹⁵

Berl Katznelson, Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.¹⁶ Ben-Gurion was even more optimistic: “The Nazis’ victory would become ‘a fertile force for Zionism’.”¹⁷

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian, wrote:

As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism ... In conditions of peace … Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism ... By the end of 1942 … the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.¹⁸

Zionism began as a reaction to anti-Semitism, especially the pogroms that followed the assassination of tsar Alexander II in 1881. Unlike most Jews themselves, Zionism accepted the main premise of the anti-Semites: that Jews did not belong in the countries where they lived. That was why anti-Semites endorsed the Zionist movement as a way of being rid of their unwanted Jews.

Zionism believed that anti-Semitism could not be fought, because it was inherent in every non-Jew. In the midst of the Dreyfus affair, when over half of France had taken up the struggle for a Jewish officer, Herzl wrote:

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

The leader of the anti-Dreyfusards was Edouard Drumont. When Drumont favourably reviewed Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish state, in an article entitled ‘Solution de la question juive’ in La Libre Parole (January 1897), Herzl expressed his delight in his diary.¹⁹

Most Jews viewed Zionism as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Davis mentions that the first Zionist Congress was held in Switzerland in 1897. What she does not mention is that it was supposed to have been held in Munich, but the Jewish community there protested against it as condoning anti-Semitism. As Sir Samuel Montagu, a Liberal MP, wrote: “Is it not ... a suspicious fact that those who have no love for the Jews, and those who are pronounced anti-Semites, all seem to welcome the Zionist proposals and aspiration?”²⁰

Zionism was a counter-revolutionary movement. After the Kishinev pogrom in April 1903 Herzl journeyed to see tsarist interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve who had organised the pogroms. Herzl asked Plehve: “Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the socialists.”²¹ Plehve approved the publication of a Zionist daily, Der Fraynd - uniquely Zionism was a legal political movement in Russia. Herzl promised that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund was outraged.²²

Davis makes great play of the ‘Marxist’-Zionist Poalei Zion workers’ organisation (PZ) omitting to mention that its founder, Ber Borochov, was expelled from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 for Zionism. ‘Socialist Zionism’ only began because mainstream Zionism, with its belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought, held no attractions for Jewish workers.

In Poland Left PZ effectively abandoned Zionism, while in Palestine PZ moved to the right, as the rhythms of colonisation and conflict with the Arabs took over. Davis argues that PZ “advocated a harmonious relationship between Jew and Arab in Palestine”. Either she knows nothing about Zionist colonisation or she is lying. PZ and its successor, Ahdut Ha’avodah, deliberately eschewed unity between Jewish and Arab workers.

Left Zionism?

Davis argues that Zionism “was never a monolithic movement with a settled ideology”. Rather it was “fractured from its early days and remains so until the present time”.

Although it is true that the Zionist movement was divided into numerous different groups, it is not true that there was no common ideology. All wings agreed that Jews, wherever they lived, formed a nation and there was also unanimity, with the exception of the tiny Brit Shalom, that their goal was the establishment of a Jewish state.

Whereas the Revisionists sought to achieve their maximalist goals at once, Ben Gurion realised that the Yishuv had to build up its strength numerically before it could realistically achieve statehood. There was an unspoken consensus among all wings that the achievement of a Jewish state would involve the ‘transfer’ of the Arabs.

The Revisionists wanted to jettison Zionism’s imperialist partners, the British, before the Yishuv was ready, whereas Ben Gurion realised that until the Yishuv reached a critical mass, the British presence was indispensable. The differences were not those of principle, but tactics.

Class and nation

The Histadrut, which Golda Meir described as a “great colonising agency”, was formed in 1920.²³The class struggle was seen as weakening the settler enterprise. In April 1924 the Palestine Communist Party adopted an anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist outlook - it was expelled from Histadrut.²⁴

The Labour Zionist slogan was ‘From class to nation’. The class struggle was to be waged not against the employers, but the Arabs. It was Labour Zionism which built the state of Israel. The Nakba was carried out primarily by the Labour Zionist militias, Haganah and Palmach, not the Revisionists.

What does a Jewish state mean? Davis ignores this question. Being Jewish in such a state would not be a religious, but a national/racial category. In Israel you can be registered as of no religion, but in terms of nationality you are Jewish.

The Jewish Nation State Law of 2018, which Davis references, states that in Israel only Jews have the right of national self-determination.²⁵ Arabs are guests - there on sufferance. They are not part of the national collective. To this very day, Israel’s Palestinian citizens face having their villages demolished in order to make way for Jewish towns. In July 2023 the residents of Ras Jrabah in the Negev were given until March 2024 to destroy their homes and leave their village to make way for the expansion of a nearby Israeli city.²⁶ This was not even in the West Bank. Half of all Israel’s Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’. They are on state land, which belongs to the Jewish ‘nation’. After all the state is a Jewish state. Such villages have no piped water, electricity or even ballot boxes in elections. This is internal colonisation.

As Netanyahu has remarked, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people - and only it.”²⁷ Ethno-religious states are a throwback to the days of feudalism. It was the bourgeois revolution in France which established in 1799 the idea that a nation includes all the people living within its territory, not just those of a particular religion.

But Davis sees opposition to a Jewish state as anti-Semitic. If so then it was surely racist to oppose the apartheid state in South Africa. No, a state based on only part of its population is clearly racist.

It is astounding that someone who calls themselves a communist cannot see how anti-Semitism was weaponised by the right to defeat the Corbyn project. For example. “Jeremy Corbyn has allowed vile anti-Semitism to fester and grow,” screamed the Daily Express.²⁸ The same paper that campaigned against the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was to the fore in opposing Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.

Similarly today, it opposes immigration: “No-one is swallowing the asylum-seeker lie any more - the game’s up,” wrote Carole Malone.²⁹ We had The Sun and the Daily Mail, fresh from employing neo-Nazi Katie Hopkins as a columnist, protesting their shock at Labour “anti-Semitism”.³⁰ Is Mary Davis really unable to join the dots?

Tom Watson and the Labour right, who made the demonisation of Muslims and asylum-seekers into a fine art, protested their abhorrence at Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Gordon Brown, whose slogan, ‘British jobs for British workers’, was coined by fascist groups such as the British National Party and National Front,³¹ fulminated against the “stain” of Labour “anti-Semitism”.³²

If there was one thing that destroyed the Corbyn project, it was the inability of the Labour left to fight back against false accusations of anti-Semitism. Yet what conclusion does Davis draw? “It is an undoubted fact that the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has been, and still is, a constant theme of left discourse.” In fact the equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a Zionist, not left theme.³³

Boris Johnson, whose racist utterances are notorious³⁴ and whose 2004 book 72 Virgins was replete with racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes, was also ‘concerned’ about Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.³⁵ Nor does Davis point out the hypocrisy of Labour MPs who attacked Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’, but supported Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ Immigration Act 2014.³⁶

Davis signals that there was no smoke without fire. She uses weasel words, talking about “persistent allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party”. Well, Watson and John Mann were certainly persistent, but they were the same people who backed the racist Labour MP, Phil Woolas, in 2010, when the High Court removed him from parliament. Woolas had apparently fought an election campaign based on “making the white folk angry”.³⁷

Davis treats the Equality and Human Rights Commission ‘investigation’ into Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ as if the EHRC was some well-meaning human rights group rather than an instrument of the British state. This is the same EHRC which has refused to investigate Tory Islamophobia and whose board is stuffed with rightwing appointees. The commissioner who conducted the inquiry, Alisdair Henderson, was later found to have been tweeting in support of fascist philosopher Roger Scruton and making derogatory comments about feminism.³⁸

Davis cannot bring herself to mention the expulsion of Jewish members of the party - the fact that Jews in the Labour Party face a five times greater chance of being expelled than non-Jews.³⁹

She says that “vibrant oppositional forces exist in Israel”, but what she does not do is explain how today Labour Zionism is an endangered species. Having formed every government from 1949 to 1977, the Israeli Labor Party has not formed a government since 1999. Mapam/Meretz, which was once the second largest party in the Knesset, has no elected members today.

Israel is a rightwing society, where the phrase ‘leftist’ is a term of abuse, where racism amongst the young is rampant and where a plurality of Jews support the expulsion of Palestinian Israelis. On every count Israeli Palestinians are discriminated against by the state. What remains of the left in Israel is extremely weak.

In the demonstrations over Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, the anti-occupation bloc has been regularly attacked by others taking part. The demonstrations are primarily a protest within the Jewish collective, from which Palestinian Israelis are absent. Meanwhile, when it comes to the army’s attack on Palestinians in Jenin and elsewhere, there is Zionist unanimity.

Davis mentions the Israeli human rights organisation, B’tselem, but omits to point out that last year it concluded that Israel was an apartheid state and that a “regime of Jewish supremacy” extends “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: this is apartheid.”⁴⁰

Today we have the phenomenon of the Jewish neo-Nazi Otzma Yehudit being part of the third largest bloc in the Knesset, yet Davis has nothing to say about this or the upsurge in settler attacks and pogroms against the Palestinians. Of course, in the protests some Israeli Jews will become radicalised and begin to understand that you cannot maintain a military dictatorship in the occupied territories and a Jewish democracy in Israel. In South Africa repression of the black population led to democracy for white people being eroded. So too in Israel.

Two states?

Davis harkens back to 1947 and the decision of Stalin to support the establishment of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’. This resulted in the weakening of the communist parties in the Arab east and the Nakba - the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians.

If there is one thing that the past half century teaches us, it is that Israel has no intention of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank. The Oslo Accords replaced the faces of Israeli soldiers with Palestinian faces. Palestinians are now beginning to recognise that the only solution is the creation, as in South Africa, of a unitary state which guarantees equal rights for all. Only racists and Zionists like Mary Davis oppose such an outcome.

A two-state solution would leave an apartheid Israeli state in place, together with a repressive Bantustan in the West Bank. The 700,000 settlers are not going anywhere and there is no appetite or desire within Israel to remove them. The Israeli Communist Party is wrong to cling to this ‘solution’, which would be an invitation to expel Israeli Palestinians into such a state.

Davis began her article by telling us how many times Zion is referred to in the Bible, as if this proved anything. Zionism has always been a political, not a religious, movement. Yes, Jews prayed for a return to the ‘Holy Land’, but, as Bernard Lazare - the original Dreyfusard and an early Zionist - noted, what this prayer was really saying was that they wished to be free.

When 2.5 million Russian Jews emigrated from tsarist Russia between the mid-19th century and 1914, some 99% went to the USA and Britain. A mere trickle of Zionist activists, most of whom did not remain, went to Palestine. Whenever Jews have been given the chance, most have chosen to go anywhere but Palestine.

Mary Davis’s article is one long apologia for Zionism. Its mistakes are too many to count. It is tendentious and is based on an imperialist-imposed partition. Ironically Israel today reflects the anti-Semitism that Jews once experienced in Europe. Instead of the chant, ‘Death to the Jews’, we now have ‘Death to the Arabs’. But this is the state that Mary Davis wishes to preserve - her article is the exact opposite of international solidarity.

Davis turns a blind eye to the fact that Zionism has always been supported by anti-Semites, from Donald Trump and Richard Spencer to Tommy Robinson. Israel has excellent relations with anti-Semitic regimes in eastern Europe, from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki. News has just come in of a meeting between Israel’s ambassador in Romania, Reuven Azar, with the holocaust-denying Alliance for the Union of Romanians leader George Simion.⁴¹

This is the reality of Zionism that Mary Davis denies.

1. J Hope Simpson Palestine: report on immigration, land settlement and development (October 1930): www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hope-simpson-report.↩︎

2. R Patai (ed) Complete diaries of Theodor Herzl New York 1960, p1194.↩︎

3. See, for example, The Jewish Telegraph Agency, September 1928: www.jta.org/archive/invite-american-to-zionst-colonization-department.↩︎

4. Ha’aretz December 1 2021 (citing G Alroey Land of refuge: immigration to the land of Israel, 1919-1927 Jerusalem 2021).↩︎

5. Ibid.↩︎

6. R Silverberg If I forget thee O Jerusalem New York 1972 p335.↩︎

7. Y Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the fate of European Jewry, 1939-1942’ Yad Vashem Studies p199.↩︎

8. M Machover and N Offenburg Zionism and its scarecrows London 1978, p58; A Bober The other Israel p171 (www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/toi/chap3-11.html); J Quigley The case for Palestine Durham NC 2005, pp26-27.↩︎

9. FR Nicosia The Third Reich and the Palestine question Piscataway NJ 2000, p57.↩︎

10. B Evron Jewish state or Israeli nation Bloomington IN 1995, p260, footnote 3, quoting a letter from Georg Landauer to Stephen Wise in 1938. This shocking letter was written at the behest of Chaim Weizmann.↩︎

11. Ibid.↩︎

12. Ibid.↩︎

13. See my review, ‘Zionist collaborators with Nazism revealed’ Weekly Worker November 5 2009: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/792/zionist-collaborators-with-nazism-revealed.↩︎

14. F Nicosia The Yishuv and the holocaust Chicago 1992, p534.↩︎

15. F Nicosia Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany Cambridge 2008, p146.↩︎

16. Ibid p91. T Segev in The seventh million (New York 2019, p18) attributes this quote to a report by Moshé Beilinson, a cofounder of the former Israeli daily, Davar.↩︎

17. T Segev The seventh million New York 2019, p18.↩︎

18. N Lucas A modern history of Israel London 1975, pp187-88.↩︎

19. D Stewart Theodor Herzl: artist and politician London 1981, p251.↩︎

20. B Klug, ‘Anti-Zionism in London’s Jewish East End, 1890-1948’, p11 (balfourproject.org/anti-zionism-in-londons-jewish-east-end-1890-1948).↩︎

21. R Patai (ed) Complete diaries of Theodor Herzl New York 1960, p1526.↩︎

22. H Tobias The Jewish Bund in Russia - from its origins to 1905 Redwood City CA 1972, p252.↩︎

23. Electronic Intifada March 9 2009. The quote is from The Observer January 24 1971.↩︎

24. M Offenburg Kommunismus in Palaestina Nation und Kalassein der anti-Kolonialen Revolution Meisenheim am Glan 1975 (PhD thesis, 1975), p187 (Khamsin No7, pp4l-5l).↩︎

25. main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf.↩︎

26. ‘Israel: court orders removal of Palestinian Negev village to build Jewish neighbourhood’ Middle East Eye July 28 2023.↩︎

27. ‘Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel is “not a state of all its citizens”’ The Guardian March 10 2019.↩︎

28. Daily Express May 30 2019.↩︎

29. Daily Express August 9 2023.↩︎

30. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3247431/MailOnline-hires-outspoken-TV-personality-Katie-Hopkins-columnist.html.↩︎

31. ‘Brown stands by British jobs for British workers remark’ The Guardian January 30 2009.↩︎

32. ‘Gordon Brown: Jeremy Corbyn must remove the “stain” of anti-Semitism from Labour’ New Statesman September 2 2018.↩︎

33. See, for example, ‘Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?’ The New Yorker May 11 2022.↩︎

34. ‘Boris Johnson called a “racist” as his past remarks are read out in Commons’ Sky News June 21 2019.↩︎

35. ‘Boris Johnson book depicts Jews as controlling the media’ The Independent December 9 2019.↩︎

36. ‘Just 6 Labour MPs voted against the 2014 Immigration Act that caused the Windrush scandal - no prizes for guessing who they were’ The London Economic April 19 2018.↩︎

37. ‘Phil Woolas “sought to make white folk angry” in general election campaign’ The Guardian September 15 2010.↩︎

38. ‘EHRC board member under scrutiny over social media use’ The Guardian November 30 2020.↩︎

39. ‘UK’s Labour accused of “purging Jews” from party over anti-Semitism claims’ Middle East Eye August 12 2021.↩︎

40. www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid.↩︎

41. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-29/ty-article/.premium/israeli-envoy-meeting-with-romanian-far-right-triggers-outrage/0000018a-41a5-dc3d-ab8f-f3e5d3840000 29.8.23.↩︎