People who want to see Putin prevail in Ukraine were overjoyed by the recent UCU congress vote against Ukraine having the arms it needs to defend itself.
Andrew Murray wrote in the Morning Star that “The University and College Union (UCU) vote to oppose the continuing war in Ukraine, including arms sales, and to support the campaigning of the Stop the War Coalition against British government policy over the war is a beacon to the rest of the movement”.
Just days earlier, the PCS conference had passed a resolution supporting Ukrainians’ right to defend themselves and liberate their country. The Morning Star didn’t even mention it.
One aspect of the UCU motion that Murray failed to mention is the clause which states: “Volodymr Zelensky says he wants Ukraine to become a ‘big Israel’ — an armed, illiberal outpost of US imperialism.”
The definition of Israel as “an armed illiberal outpost of US imperialism” was not, in fact, something which Zelenskyy actually said. On one occasion, over a year ago, Zelenskyy stated that Ukraine might have to become “a big Israel” out of necessity, because it would have a permanently hostile neighbour. That’s all.
Endorsement
The clause amounts to an endorsement of Putin’s pretext for his invasion of Ukraine: In order to defend Russia’s legitimate security concerns in the face of expansionary US imperialism, he claimed, he was left with no alternative but to launch an invasion.
The clause can also be read as an endorsement of Putin’s war aim of the destruction of the Ukrainian state.
But if Murray chose to ignore the rather embarrassing “Israel” comparison, John Wight, an uncritical contributor to Putin’s RT television channel who (writing on the Medium website) has repeatedly described the Russian invasion as an “anti-Nazi” cause, has no such hesitation.
In the Morning Star of 9 June, Mr Wight describes Israel as a “proto-fascist state” (note: the “state” not just the present far-right government) that is protected from criticism by “the success of the pro-Israel lobby in the West”. It is based upon “white supremacy in a Zionist variant” (again, not just the present government, but the state itself).
“Israel is not a democracy, it is a settler-colonial state” Mr Wight informs us without mentioning the circumstances under which those “settlers” arrived.
But his central theme is “the similarities that now exist between Ukraine and Israel”. He has to admit that “Ukraine is not a settler-colonial project” but goes on to repeat Putin’s discredited propaganda stating that “the mistreatment of its ethnic and Russian-speaking minority in Southern Ukraine since 2014 has been as brutal and murderous as that meted out to the Palestinians by Israel” (exaggerated allegations of mistreatment amounting to genocide of Russian speakers in Donbas and elsewhere have been one of Putin’s justifications for the invasion).
Wight’s comparison concludes with the claim that “both countries are drowning in the poison of ethno-nationalism, and both are US vassal states, dependent upon Washington’s support and economic largesse.”
In Wight’s worldview, Israel is an artificial construction (an outpost of US imperialism) not the expression of the (supposedly non-existent) Hebrew-Jewish nation. It therefore has no right to exist. Like Putin, he clearly takes the same view of Ukraine.
Mr Wight, in his crude, pro-Putin, conspiratorial left-antisemitism, has summed up the thinking behind the UCU anti-Ukraine motion. Murray, the Morning Star, the Communist Party of Britain and people like the Socialist Workers Party, in reality go along with this stuff, but generally avoid stating it in public. I suppose we should thank Mr Wight for bringing it out into the open.
• In preparing this piece, I have made use of Dale Street’s article The Left, the UCU motion, and antisemitism