Left antisemitism

Socialist Worker (SW), paper of the Socialist Worker Party (SWP), is ecstatic. At last it has found a trade union (the UCU, which organises workers in post-school education) that has passed a motion at its annual congress backing the Stop the War Coalition (StW) line on Ukraine. True, the motion was passed by just nine votes. True, the motion contained an antisemitic trope jumbling up Ukraine and Israel as imperialist outposts. True, Jewish UCU members critical of the motion have been targeted for antisemitic abuse. True, another, and far better, motion on Ukraine was passed by a much larger...

Antisemitism, including the antisemitism of the left, has found a new cause célèbre: the war in Ukraine.

Some sections of the left have welcomed the vote by last month’s UCU annual congress to adopt a motion which incorporated the Stop the War Coalition (STW) line on Ukraine.

Little over a decade ago the UCU trade union (which represents staff in Further and Higher Education) was hit by a wave of resignations by Jewish members. They no longer found the union to be habitable for Jews. Their resignations followed decisions by successive UCU congresses to: boycott Israeli academics and HE institutions; sever ties with the Israeli trade union federation Histadrut; disassociate the union from the EUMC definition of antisemitism (a forerunner of the IHRA definition); reject a motion condemning UCU’s decision to invite an international speaker known for antisemitism; and...

In Solidarity 661 I described the journalist Peter Oborne’s largely uncritical attitude to Islamic regimes and Islamist movements; in issue 663 I showed that his claim that the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair was a “hoax” is incorrect. I will now go on to examine his attitude towards claims of antisemitism within Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and, in particular, his role in making and promoting the Al Jazeera series The Labour Files . It is important to note that Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari state and in 2019 produced a video claiming that the holocaust had been “exaggerated” by the “Zionist...

Keir Starmer used a speech welcoming the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) end to its monitoring of the Labour Party for antisemitism to rule out Jeremy Corbyn standing as a Labour candidate in the next election. In Labour’s rules, Starmer has no power to making that ruling. But selections in the last 18 months have shown the right-controlled National Executive (NEC) doing effectively whatever it likes. Previous guarantees that candidates with enough branch or union backing would automatically make longlists or shortlists have vanished. Former MPs have been prevented from standing...

Solidarity has long argued that sections of the left have fallen into particular form of antisemitism. Starting from ultra-hostility to Israel which goes beyond criticising the real misdeeds of its governments and into demonising it as the world’s hyper-imperialism and hyper-racism, they end up reflexively hostile to all “Zionists”, i.e. all Jews who have some default or instinctive affinity with Israel, however critical. Readers who wonder why should look at how the same sections of the left portray the war in Ukraine. In this portrayal of the conflict, Ukraine takes on many of the political...

Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files , much like its 2017 series The Lobby , contains neither the explosive revelations promised nor a convincing political case that “antisemitism smears” were the downfall of the Corbyn leadership. Over nearly four hours, we get only a handful of information that people active in the labour movement during the Corbyn period would not have known. The right-wing in the Labour party are devious and seek to disrupt left-wing activists from organising. MPs worked alongside the Labour bureaucracy to shut down local parties, shared correspondence and were more interested in...

Mish Rahman's defeat in the Labour NEC election is a step backwards for the left The two-yearly elections for Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) and other positions (results out on 1 September) show a continuing drift to the right. In 2020 the left won five seats in the NEC constituency section to three for the right, and one for Ann Black (reckoned as “centre”). This year: four left, four right, and Black. The right also won the Young Labour seat on the NEC; with backing from Unison and GMB, Elsie Greenwood beat incumbent Lara McNeill. Turnout was down again. In 2018, when the left...

Martin Forde QC, who led the inquiry that produced the Labour Party's new report The 138 pages of the Forde report into factional conflict, organisational culture and the handling of bigotry and discrimination in the Labour Party were published on 19 July. Among its findings is that on antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, “although disciplinary action and expulsions may be appropriate in extreme cases, in many instance a meaningful educational and awareness-building programme will be more effective.” It criticises the very limited and politically limited training the party has done so far...