Ideological myopia has
Any understanding of antisemitism on the left must start with anti-Zionism and how it evolved alongside the rise and fall of the USSR, decolonisation and Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts
THERE HAVE been many explanations for the rapid spread of antisemitic utterances within the British left.
For some, the explanation is that it is ideologically ingrained since the birth of socialism; for others, sheer ignorance about Jewish history exacerbated by social media; for still others, an indifference to the Jews per se, that Jews are unimportant in the grand scheme in working for the greater good. But a central factor is the visceral opposition to Zionism — regarded as racism and solely responsible for the exodus of Arabs from Palestine in 1948.
Many committed Labour figures started off on the far left but eventually moved away.
Len McCluskey was close to the Militant Tendency, Ken Loach was associated with the Socialist Labour League while Seumas Milne worked with the Communist party faction Straight Left. Views, however, often evolved to meet a changing situation. Indeed, Sir Alfred Sherman, a Jew from Hackney, fought as a Communist in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s but remarkably ended up providing intellectual foundations for Thatcherism in the 1970s. Seumas Milne, however, widely regarded as Mr Corbyn’s political mentor, has not mellowed with age but has carried his political philosophy and hardcore anti-Zionism into the heart of the Labour Party in 2019.
In the inter-war years, many Jews belonged to the Communist Party to fight fascism and to create a better world. In 1939 they were suddenly asked to place their belief in the Nazi-Soviet pact and Stalin’s good judgment. They were asked to turn a blind eye to the millions of Polish Jews trapped in Hitler’s latest fiefdom so that the Soviet Union might benefit. Communist Jews such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ivor Montagu enthusiastically went along with this — even though it was fast becoming a matter of life and death for many Jews. There were no qualms when the Soviets handed over 1,000 people, including 300 Jews, to the Gestapo at the border at Brest-Litovsk in 1940. Many changed their place of residence from the gulag to the concentration camp.
Many British Jews subsequently turned their back on Communism. The murder of the Yiddish writers, the Slansky trial in 1952 and the false accusation in 1953 that a cabal of Jewish doctors was planning to poison the leaders of the USSR burst the bubble and Jews deserted the party in droves. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 further caused an exodus of loyalists from the party.
In the early 1960s, the continual reports of antisemitism in the USSR, the publication of crude caricatures in its press and the equating of Israeli Zionists with German Nazis — all before the conquest of the West Bank and the settlement drive — was the subject of internal discussion within the British Communist Party.
Dissent finally surfaced when the party condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of “socialism with a human face” in 1968.
Such condemnation of the Soviet Union catalysed schisms within the party. The Soviet stand-off with China spawned several Maoist groups. By the end of the 1970s, the party was riven with factions. The Euro-Communists and their glossy periodical, Marxism Today, had captured the party leadership while their opponents in the Morning Star fought for autonomy.
A third faction, the pro-Kremlin Straight Left, advocated closer ties with the Labour Party and, in particular, its left wing. Its initiator, Fergus Nicholson, had been a long-time recruiter of students and youth to the party.
He realised that there had to be some means of access to
Labour, clearly
the party of the working class, and resented “our forced exclusion” from the broad labour movement. Straight Left was both a faction within the Communist Party and a non-aligned publication of the broad left. Several of Mr Corbyn’s inner circle, including Andrew Murray and Seumas Milne, were associated from the outset with Straight Left. Their opponents in the Communist party accused them of “Labourphilia”. Mr Corbyn had no reservations about working
Many Jews turned their back on Communism