Delivered hate
Jeremy Corbyn and his senior aide Seumas Milne, who cut their political teeth within different British hard-left factions. Left: the now-defunct voice of Britain’s Communist Party, and the which calls itself “Britain’s last Communist newspaper”
with them and began to write regularly in the Morning Star.
They achieved their lifelong dream of controlling Labour when Mr Corbyn accidentally became party leader in 2015 — the barriers which had kept the far left outside for a century had been dramatically removed.
They maintained their affection for the Kremlin and simply transferred their allegiance from Leonid Brezhnev to Vladimir Putin — supportive of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and quiescent in the annexation of the Crimea in 2014. They remain reluctant to criticise Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a long time Soviet ally. Mr Corbyn was hesitant to point the finger at Russian military intelligence over the Skripal poisonings.
Many Corbynistas came of age during the period of decolonisation. They therefore identified in the 1960s with the nascent Palestinian national movement rather than with Israel.
Even though Stalin had promoted the establishment of a Hebrew republic in 1948, he refused to allow Soviet Jews to leave for Israel. Many were instead sentenced for Zionist activities to long terms in strict regime labour camps. It was therefore possible
to accept Israel’s existence, but to oppose Zionism.
The Corbynistas could not overcome the fact that the Soviet Union had recognised Israel in 1948. Hence the continued support for a two-state solution while simultaneously opposing Zionism as “a racist endeavour”. They logically sought out peripheral antiZionist Jews rather than engaging with Jewish organisations which did not disavow Zionism.
It became possible therefore for the Corbynistas to support “a state of Israel”, but not one which is Zionist and one that does not necessarily have to have a Jewish majority. As Mr Milne has argued, any settlement between Israelis and Palestinians would require some “reversal of the historic ethnic cleansing”.
Mr Milne came of political age with the ascendency of the Likud in the late 1970s. His return from a left-wing Grand Tour of the Middle East left him committed to the Palestinian cause on his return to
Oxford University. Like the PLO, he opposed the BeginSadat Camp
David agreement of 1979.
The 1980s however proved difficult. While Thatcherism was embedding itself in the UK, Gorbachev was advocating glasnost and perestroika in the USSR — and even more alarmingly, Arafat was seeking a pathway towards rapprochement with Israel.
Many identified with the rejectionists in the PLO — those who declared the handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn to be nothing more than a betrayal.
Mr Milne’s inability to recognise the raison d’être for the rise of Zionism was more recently encapsulated in his reported encouragement of Ken Livingstone to make his inaccurate “Hitler and Zionism” comment.
Whereas many Palestinian nationalists have moved to an accommodation with Israel, Palestinian Islamists have not. For Mr Milne, the central point is Palestinian resistance to Israel and not the political colouring of those who resist — even if reactionary and antisemitic. Mr Corbyn has happily followed Mr Milne in not discerning between advocates of the Palestinian cause.
Mr Milne warned the left in the past to “aggressively police the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism”. Yet the reality of the last few years do not bare this out. It is the difference between theory and practice. It is also the lesson that British Jews have learned — the hard way — from history.
Mr Milne once commented that “for all its brutalities and failures, Communism... delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality” — but it did not deliver for the Jews as a people.
There are many Jews who wish to repair this country and desire a just settlement with the Palestinians. The Corbynistas in the depths of their ideological blindness have gone out of their way to alienate too many Jewish progressives. Like the Bourbon monarchs of revolutionary France, the Corbynistas have forgotten nothing and learned nothing from the lessons of history.
Milne opposed the Begin-Sadat Camp David agreement
Colin Shindler is emeritus professor of Israel Studies at SOAS, University of London