Left antisemitism

As always, Tony Greenstein doesn't debate the issue in dispute. He worries around the edges of it, quibbling over secondary details and evading the questions he is supposed to be dealing with. The "Perdition" Affair The chunks of Perdition I quoted were not from 'early drafts' (where would I have got them?) The version just published in book form was the fourth. The one I quoted from was the second. This was the one scheduled for production at the Royal Court Theatre, and it got some circulation, initially when the Royal Court sent out copies to theatre critics. The third draft was, I...

On 19 March, Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent and a self-described member of al Qaeda, killed three Jewish children and an adult at a Jewish school in Toulouse; the previous week he had shot dead three French soldiers of North African origin. At first the killer’s identity was not known. On 22 March Merah was tracked down by French police and shot dead. Yves Coleman, of the journal Ni patrie, ni frontières, discusses and criticises the reaction of the left to Merah’s killings. Anti-semitism and anti-Judaism have a long history in France. Pogroms happened around the first...

Two bottom lines: vote Labour. And expel Livingstone from the Labour Party. If poor Eric Joyce can be expelled simply for getting pissed and punching a few Tories, then surely Livingstone’s blatant anti-semitism should be sufficient to get him booted out. I’ve campaigned and voted for candidates as bad as Livingstone before: Liam Byrne for one. Voting Labour is a class duty, not a petty bourgeois choice. But that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate whatever the Party machine serves up. Miliband’s defence of Livingstone is disgraceful. Livingstone must be expelled. But until he is, we must...

In his letter giving his recollections of the debate around the (successful) attempt to ban the Sunderland Polytechnic Jewish Society in the 1980s ( Solidarity 238), Brian Plainer highlights the “natural bias” of “500-600 mostly overseas Arab/Islamic students”, which he believes represented “a significant block vote in favour of banning the Jewish Society”. Brian is on thin ice here. Lazy assumptions about the “natural biases” of a given ethnic, cultural or national group also made up part of the thinking of the “Jew = Zionist = supporter of Israeli government policy” equations in the heads of...

A letter from prominent Jewish Labour Party supporters to party leader Ed Miliband, leaked to the press around 21 March, has expressed some profound concerns following a 1 March meeting between party activists and London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone. The letter’s authors are by no means left-wingers. They criticise Livingstone for being too stridently hostile to what he considers “bourgeois” elements (if only!) and characterise his politics as “infantile far-left”. But one does not have to endorse the wider politics of the authors to conclude that most of their criticisms of Livingstone’s...

Prominent anti-Zionist writer Norman Finkelstein has broken from the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement, denouncing it as a “cult” and saying that it is based on a politics of “eliminating Israel” but is too dishonest to say so. Finkelstein, whose books include The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah, has until now focused much of his work on arguing his view that Israel and its supporters internationally manipulate or manufacture claims of anti-Semitism and imagined existential threats to Israel in order to suppress criticism of the state. But now he has denounced the...

AWL member Daniel Lemberger Cooper’s victory in the recent [2012] elections at the University of London Union (2-9 February) was won in the teeth of a large campaign, orchestrated by the SWP, branding Cooper a “racist” on the grounds that he is “a Zionist”, i.e. he defends Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, while also supporting the right of the Palestinians to an independent state of their own alongside Israel. This recent flurry is an echo of an old argument. In the student movement in Britain, it started in 1974. In April that year, the National Union of Students (NUS) voted for...

2012 marks the 60th anniversary of the so-called Trial of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre led by Rudolf Slansky. The Slansky trial: contents . Click here to download as pdf The Slansky Trial was one of a series of Eastern European post-war Stalinist show-trials in which leading Communist Party members confessed — after prolonged physical and psychological torture — to being longstanding agents of American imperialism. But the trial also broke new ground. It was the first show-trial in which state-sponsored anti-semitism played a central role. As the New York Times, reporting under the...

At the centre of the supposed conspiracy was Rudolf Slansky, a lifelong member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPC). He had joined the party at its inception in 1921 and been elected to its Central Committee in 1929. The Slansky trial: contents . Elected to the Czechoslovak National Assembly in 1935, Slansky fled to the Soviet Union after the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1944, taking part in the Slovak National Rising, and was elected CPC General Secretary the following year. Following the CPC putsch of 1948, in which the non-CPC parties...

The same meeting also marked the introduction of “anti-Zionism” (in reality: anti-semitism) into the preparations for the eventual show-trial. The Slansky trial: contents . While Gottwald made no more than a passing reference to the high number of arrested CPC members who “did not grow from the roots of our country and our party,” the party’s ideologue, Vaclav Kopecky spoke at length about the dangers of “cosmopolitanism” and Zionism: “Cosmopolitans should in principle not be posted in leadership positions. This truly is an issue of cosmopolitanism, not a racial question. There are people of...