Jewish new year is a time for reflection, and the subject of Labour and antisemitism inevitably featured on the list of things to think about this year. Indeed, it was hard to avoid, for on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Labour MP Chuka Umunna proclaimed his party to be “institutionally racist” over antisemitism. Folded into this row is a painful aspect of the story: that elements of the left, for whom fighting racism is a deeply held principle, might overlook, underplay or even reproduce this ancient race-hate against Jewish people.
The issue has coalesced around the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his supporters. But in truth, it is nothing new. Published in the early 1980s, Jewish socialist Steve Cohen’s book That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic, still resonates today. He wrote: “It is intolerable that the socialist movement has never been prepared to look at its antisemitism in a self-critical way.”
Leftwing antisemitism can arise from common misconceptions, such as coding all Jewish people (including those, like me, from an Arab-Jewish background) as white – in both political and status terms. Racism as an imagined white superiority over people of colour underpins current discrimination and appalling historical injustices such as colonialism and slavery, which continue to cause terrible harm today. By contrast, a core antisemitic trope is the Jewish conspiracy of a shadowy all-powerful group controlling the world, or at least the media – based on an imagined superior status of Jews. Perceptions of Jewish people as “white” can also mask their persecution as a racialised minority. Jews were long hated as the “other”, the Orientals of Europe, in language of a type deployed to demonise Arab and Muslim populations today.
Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has driven a wedge between battles against racism and antisemitism. The Oxford philosopher Brian Klug locates the genesis of this divide in a 1975 UN general assembly resolution asserting that Zionism, alongside colonialism and foreign occupation “is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. This, Klug argues, “erased the origins of Zionism in the Jewish historical experience of exclusion, expulsion and racial discrimination”. Eventually dropped, the resolution, he says, had a lasting effect on the left – diminishing the idea that, as well as being experienced as colonial racial discrimination by Palestinians, Zionism was also a national movement born of oppression and trauma. Cohen sums up this duality by describing Zionism as both racist and anti-racist – the latter because it was an answer to the murderous anti-Jewish racism of Europe.
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