31.07.2002

Whose double standards?

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty equates the refusal to recognise the Israeli nation's right to exist with anti-semitism. Ian Donovan argues that this plays into the hands of the economistic left

The AWL's Clive Bradley descended into incoherence in his letter to the Weekly Worker (July 18). He was attempting to defend his organisation's strange accusation that the views on Israel of the numerically dominant trend of the revolutionary left in Britain today, the Socialist Workers Party, represents anti-semitism (ie, anti-jewish racism). One does not have to share the SWP's moralistic view of the Israeli working class (as a labour aristocracy incapable of class struggle and of uniting with its Arab class brethren in a struggle for democracy and socialism) to see that the AWL's polemic in this regard is a gift to the SWP leadership. This 'critique' only helps the SWP tops portray those rational political positions which the AWL shares with ourselves as criticism from the right. In reality, our critique of the SWP on the Middle East is from the left, from the standpoint of consistent democracy, not from the standpoint of any kind of conciliation with the thoroughly anti-democratic, viciously racist and anti-working class reality of Israel as it currently exists. Comrade Bradley engages in shallow, sectarian self-praise when he asserts that our disagreement with the AWL is motivated by some "desperate urge" to "distinguish" ourselves from them, some kind of attempt to appear "polite and conventional" and is therefore a capitulation to the SWP. No, comrade, our opposition to the hyperbole of your organisation on this question is one of principle - we are opposed to idiosyncratic deviations from rationality, since they undermine the possibility of real political interaction and principled unity on the left. This kind of glorying in the substitution of abuse for polemic - and the portrayal of an aversion to this practice as in some way cowardly - is perhaps a remnant of the AWL leadership's once fervent admiration for James P Cannon and his methods of political leadership. The baleful influence of this tradition on the left can be seen when looking at some of the more hysterical and purist elements of orthodox Trotskyism - we at least are trying to build an alternative to that. Comrade Bradley denies that the AWL believes "that the Socialist Workers Party or other leftists are 'outright anti-semites', if by 'outright' you mean conscious advocates of pogroms or neo-Hitlerite ideologues". Presumably, in his view, they are only 'unconscious' anti-jewish racists. He then goes on to regale us with an anecdote about an "SWP teacher" who sought to project himself as an anti-Zionist in order to allegedly combat the anti-semitism of some muslim students in a London school. He somewhat unconvincingly declaims that, "To compare even the worst crimes of 'Zionism' or the Israeli state with Nazi genocide, however - which is the comparison at issue - is both wrong politically and as a meaningful comparison. Nothing Israel has ever done to the Palestinians is remotely comparable to Nazi genocide. That doesn't mean what Israel has done is okay. It means that socialists should keep a sense of proportion." Unfortunately for comrade Bradley, the latter point could also be said of Nazi Germany itself in 1939, prior to the holocaust. Nothing it had done at that point could be remotely compared to the outright genocide, the organised attempt to wipe out the jewish population, that followed after 1941. However, what was reality for the jewish population of Germany then, as indeed is the case of the Palestinian Arabs living under Israeli rule today, is the experience of open, systematic, racist oppression, of being ruled by a state power that by its actions, the very fabric of its law and practice, and often the explicit statements of its representatives, makes it quite clear that it believes that the oppressed population has no right to normal citizenship. In particular, Israel's laws on ownership of land exclusively by jews, which regularly leads to the expropriation from their homes of Arab Israeli citizens even now; and the existence of the so-called 'right to return' exclusively for jewish people around the world, while Arab victims of ethnic cleansing are barred from the country their families still inhabited (and had for centuries) within living memory, are explicitly racist laws quite comparable with those of Hitler's Germany or its later imitators such as apartheid South Africa. There was probably less legally sanctioned explicit racism in Italy under Mussolini than there is in Israel today. This has been the normal practice right from the very foundation of Israel in the 1940s; it is only comparatively recently, under the pressure of a rise of a Palestinian national movement that was impossible to ignore, that Israeli politicians have even begun to concede the existence of Palestinians as a people at all. The logic of such denial is genocidal, however you dress it up. Anti-jewish racism among muslims can also not be viewed in isolation from the bloody actions of the Israel state over five decades. It should be noted that there is no native racist anti-jewish tradition among muslims that such elements can draw on. There are harsh expressions about the jewish religion in the Koran, for instance - however, the christian religion gets equally severe treatment from Mohammad and his allegedly divine mentor - and mere religious denunciation in itself does not substitute for such a tradition. In order to give expression to anti-jewish racism Hamas, for instance, has to borrow the Protocols of the elders of Zion from the putrid history of east European reaction. Unfortunately, the Israeli state itself bears the chief responsibility for the rise of Hamas and islamism among Palestinians - not only did they promote and covertly finance these organisations in the 1970s and 1980s as a means of undermining the secular and leftist Palestinian organisations; they also, through the policy of the systematic expropriation of Arab land in the occupied territories as well as in Israel proper, have driven significant sections of the Arab population into their arms in despair. There should be no pulling punches about the reactionary nature of the islamist organisations and their adoption of western anti-jewish racism - and equally there should be no pulling punches about the reactionary adoption of, and embellishment of, imperial/colonial anti-Arab racism by the founders of Israel. Our anecdotal SWP teacher, therefore, however clumsily he may or may not have elucidated his view, may have had at least some truth on his side in supposing that anti-jewish sentiments among young muslims are often related to the actions of the Israeli state against Arab muslims, and that to combat these sentiments one has to demonstrate that socialists are also determined opponents of such oppression. One kind of racism often begets another, and to fight it one has to demonstrate that one is opposed to all such oppressive creeds. By condemning this, comrade Bradley comes close to saying that anti-jewish racism is uniquely evil, qualitatively worse than, for instance, anti-Arab or anti-muslim racism. Not so: in my view they are equally vile and reactionary. The racism of Begin, for instance, who once described Arabs as "beasts who walk on two legs", is equally vile as that of the Nazis who described jews as being sub-humans. This is why we should also maintain, in comrade Bradley's words, "a sense of proportion", when making declamations about those who, based on a moralistic leftist view of the oppressor population, believe that Israel, as a "colonial settler state", has no right to exist. This is not uniquely about Israel at all - similar attitudes are widespread concerning the Unionist population of Northern Ireland. They too are viewed by many leftists as a colonial-settler population who, by virtue of their undoubted privilege over the nationalist population and their equally undoubted extreme chauvinism, forfeit all rights as a community or arguably a semi-nation. But of course, Ulster protestants have never been the targets of any world historic form of bigotry themselves, so any attempt to associate leftists who hold this particular moralistic/Irish republican position with any such form of bigotry is a non-starter. The AWL foolishly attempts to associate comrades who share this erroneous, but clearly leftwing, position, and apply it in an exactly analogous manner to the Israel-Palestine question, with the world-historic, foul bigotry of anti-jewish racism. Or, as comrade Bradley says, ""¦ their demonological attitude to Israel and 'Zionism' makes them hostile to most jews, who are Zionists, and they take attitudes that amount to double standards when it comes to jews". Not really double standards at all - they have the same attitude towards Ulster protestants - for the same reasons. Anti-semitism is a form of racism, otherwise it is meaningless as a term. The allegation that the SWP's erroneous perspective is a manifestation of racism is mischievous sectarianism and utterly corrosive of the real debate that needs to be had with these new left moralists. It is an idiocy that undermines those rational positions that we share with the AWL. We oppose it not out of concern for 'politeness', but for the same reason we oppose the symmetrical smear that the AWL is some kind of hardened anti-muslim, pro-Israeli organisation: for reasons of political honesty.