Left antisemitism

See our publications and more articles on fighting antisemitism.

Momentum's video on antisemitism

The following article is based on a Twitter thread, here . The author plans to expand it into a longer piece. Momentum has produced a video on antisemitism . I think this is a step in the right direction, and it’s good to see Momentum putting out content that directly challenges the idea that there’s no antisemitism on the left. But there’s quite a bit in this I’d query... It seems to present antisemitism on the left mainly as an incursion from wider society, and figures antisemitism as essentially a right-wing phenomenon that seeps into the left. But there are specific, discrete forms of...

Defining away antisemitism - again

Soon after the murderous antisemitic attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue on 27 October, at least two Constituency Labour Parties voted down or gutted motions condemning antisemitism. The people in those CLPs will of course have been as horrified by the synagogue attack as we are. But enough of them had ideas similar to those expressed by Jewish Voice for Labour secretary Glyn Secker in a recent "Labour Against Racism and Fascism" meeting: that antisemitism is not an issue in Britain . The conclusion drawn is that any complaint about antisemitism, or affirmation against it, should be dismissed as...

“We are losing Jews from the Labour Party”

Adrian Cohen spoke to a local Workers’ Liberty supporter. S: Our CLP [Constituency Labour Party], Hornsey and Wood Green, with one of the largest memberships in the country, voted at its October meeting to affiliate to Jewish Voice for Labour [JVL: a group concerned to reject complaints about antisemitism in the Labour Party as spurious]. Now we have a letter from people in the local Jewish community to the CLP calling for the affiliation to be stopped. Adrian, you are the chair of the London Jewish Forum and a Jewish Labour Movement delegate to the CLP, and a signatory to the letter in your...

How to be pro-Palestinian without being “anti-Zionist”

A French translation of this article can be found here. The term “anti-Zionist” was rare in political discourse when real debates with Zionists were a lively part of the broadly-defined left, in the early 20th century. Its use quadrupled in the 1930s, when the Stalinist movement took an overt “anti-Zionist” and antisemitic turn. It multiplied by three again, to twelve times the level of the early 1930s, in the 1970s, when the term “Zionist” had lost meaning in general circulation other than as a catch-all curse-word. So Google Ngram’s statistics show. Studies such as Dave Rich’s The Left’s...

Don’t define away antisemitism

Hornsey and Wood Green Labour Party affiliated to Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) at its meeting on 25 October 2018. Sadly, that cannot be seen as a prefigurative act of solidarity with Jewish communities facing such things as the gun attack on a Pittsburgh (USA) synagogue on 27 October as well as more everyday suspicion and abuse. The problem is with the politics of JVL, especially some of its committee. At the launch meeting of Labour Against Racism and Fascism on 15 October, JVL secretary Glyn Secker spoke against a proposal to include antisemitism (alongside Afrophobia and Islamophobia) in...

Due process and a fair hearing

There is now a single unified “left” slate for the expanded Labour Party National Constitutional Committee. With the backing of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Momentum and several smaller organisations, this slate will probably receive many Labour Party nominations and the majority of the delegate votes. The opposing slates from Labour First and Open Labour are yet to write anything publicly on what they see as their role on the NCC. The united left candidates have co-signed an article for the Labour Hub website. Some of what they have to say is promising if vague. Other questions...

Discussing left antisemitism

Workers’ Liberty branches around the country have in the last month been organising meetings on left antisemitism, discussing what this phenomenon is and how to fight it. Meetings have taken place in Sheffield, Lewisham, King’s Cross, Oxford, Bristol, Northampton, Brixton, Newcastle, and Durham. The attitude from some in the Momentum and Labour leaderships has been to treat the question as one of embarrassing public relations optics, perhaps to be dealt with by expelling a few of the worst offenders; serious discussion and debate of the issues, involving proper historical analysis, has not, on...

Left antisemitism: what it is and how to fight it

Click here to download text of pamphlet as pdf Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party a number of political storms have taken place in which Corbyn and the wider left have been accused of antisemitism. Some on the left contend such accusations are “smears”, with no basis in reality, fabricated by right-wing forces to impede the rise of the left. We disagree. We have argued for many years that certain aspects of the political common sense dominant on the far left, particularly in terms of how it views the Israel/Palestine conflict have antisemitic implications. This pamphlet...

A racist endeavour?

One of the eleven examples of antisemitism in the IHRA is this: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.” With the IHRA adoption by Labour, some on the Labour left, has asserted their “right” to call Israel a “racist endeavour”. Shortly after the Labour NEC vote a posters carrying the slogan “Israel is a racist endeavour” popped up around London. At first appearance it seems not an unreasonable slogan: Israel’s government is doing a lot of racist things, passing racist laws and occupying...

Yes "smash Israel" is antisemitic

The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has decided to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in full. This is a step forward for Labour but only after weeks of indecision, confusion and lack of leadership in a row which may have caused a great deal of damage. In adopting the IHRA definition, the NEC added a qualifying statement stressing that freedom of speech should be allowed in relation to criticism of the Israeli government. But the IHRA should not be an impediment to free speech unless it is used cynically or...

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