By Alice Bondi, Labour Party member, Penrith and the Borders CLP
This article is the substance of a talk given by Alice Bondi, a member of Jewish Voice for Labour, to the first ever meeting of the LEFT HORIZONS DISCUSSION GROUP in Carlisle.
I was no more than ten years old when I asked my father to explain what apartheid meant. The Home Service news was often on in our house, and I kept hearing this word which I didn’t understand. The moment is seared into my memory – I remember exactly where I was sitting (on the living room window sill with my feet on the radiator), and the feeling I had as the horror of what my father was describing impacted on me. And despite my young age, I immediately realised that he had explained it so powerfully because he had experiences that resonated with that of black people in South Africa.
My father had grown up as a Jew in Vienna. He knew, from the inside, what it was like to be regarded as ‘lesser’, as not deserving of full human rights on the basis of one’s membership of a particular group.
I start with this story, not because I am trying to say that apartheid and antisemitism are identical, but because I want to place antisemitism firmly within the context of racism and prejudice generally. It is not something separate and cannot be understood fully unless we are clear about its existence as just one of the ways in which groups of humans ‘other’ an identifiable group.
Some history of antisemitism in Europe is worth outlining, as you will see that the themes of modern antisemitism have their roots in the myths and realities surrounding Jews from the earliest times. I do first, however, need to explain who Jews are, and that I will be speaking about only one particular grouping within the wider Jewish community.
There are Jews all across the world. What makes someone a Jew is their membership of a Jewish community, which is conferred by being born to a Jewish mother or by conversion. Once someone converts, they are as Jewish as any other Jew, although in modern times Orthodox Jews do not in general recognise non-Orthodox conversions.
According to Jewish tradition and custom, an individual remains a Jew whether or not they believe in the religion of Judaism, and only conversion to another religion changes that status. There have been Jewish communities in India, believed to have been founded over two thousand years ago, and those Jews look like other Indians. There are African Jewish communities, particularly Ethiopian, and they look like the people around them, and are similarly ancient in origin.
‘European’ and ‘Spanish’ Jews
After the expulsion of Jews from Spain, groups spread out across north Africa and the Middle East and become known as Sephardi – ‘Spanish’ – Jews. The Jews of Europe are known as Ashkenazim, and the notion that Jewishness is ‘racial’ comes from the fact of centuries of intermarriage concentrated certain physical characteristics. Just as people who live in other isolated communities come to have a particular ‘look’, so did the large nose so beloved of Jew-hating cartoonists, the dark curly hair etc, become particularly common.
Of course, there are Ashkenazi Jews with fair hair, small noses etc, but the stereotypes are hard to budge. It is the Ashkenazi Jews and the European groups of Sephardi Jews that are the ones I will be referring to in my explanation of antisemitism and how we come to be where we are now in relation to the subject.
Antisemitism dates from even earlier than the foundation of Christianity. Jews didn’t assimilate, didn’t adopt all the customs of the Greeks and Romans, so were obviously ‘different’ – and hence were a minority group who could be identified and blamed for whatever was the current problem, or attacked as a way of unifying the ‘in group’. These are things that happen in all societies – it seems that humans find it easier to make social bonds by uniting against others and find it easier to blame someone else rather than reflecting on their own responsibility for things. We see it all the time….!
There’s no doubt that the split between Christianity (which began as a Jewish sect) and Judaism gave impetus to a hatred, harassment and targeting of individual Jews and Jewish communities. Initially this was on the basis that ‘the Jews killed Jesus’.
It’s not worth getting into all the reasons why this is nonsense, because obviously being unpleasant to people today on the basis of something that may or may not have happened 2000 years ago is somewhat ludicrous anyway. In medieval times, myths about Jews kidnapping, killing and bleeding Christian children and drinking the blood in some mockery of the Christian eucharist were widespread. This was a more than bizarre accusation – among all else, Jews are very particular about draining all the blood from meat before eating it!
‘Ghettos’ originated in Italy
In England, among other horrific incidents, Jews were attacked in York in 1190. After taking refuge in Clifford’s Tower, 150 committed suicide rather than being murdered by the mob. A hundred years later, Jews were expelled from England by Edict of Edward I. Only under Cromwell was there any overt toleration of Jews in this country. Scotland never expelled or officially persecuted Jews.
The refusal to convert to Catholicism led to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 (my family included) and from Portugal a little later. Corralling Jews into particular areas occurred in many places, including Venice, where the first area called a ‘ghetto’ was established in 1516 and it continued until Bonaparte’s conquest of Venice in 1797.
In central Europe, the Pale of Settlement was the boundary of the central European area of the old Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to live, from 1791 to 1917. This didn’t mean that it was a safe place to be and from about 1881 pogroms, large-scale persecution of Jews with swept through the Pale and elsewhere, with property destroyed and sometimes murder. And this is the context in which the word ‘antisemitism’ was invented.
Prior to 1879, people merely referred to Jew-hatred, but Wilhelm Marr wanted his prejudice to sound a little more ‘scientific’ and invented the word. It’s a weird one, as ‘semitic’ actually is the term for the Afro-Asiatic language group of which Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Tigrinya, Maltese and others belong, and has come to be used for the peoples who speak those languages. ‘Antisemitic’, however, has come to apply only to Jews and Herr Marr never intended it to apply to anyone else, and its adoption as a term for hatred of Jews has been widely adopted to mean only that.
Christians not permitted to lend money
In medieval Europe, Jews were excluded from most professions, but one way of earning a living open to them was money-lending. Christians were not permitted to charge interest, but the aristocracy urgently needed to be able to borrow money – hence the task fell to Jews, who also become tax and rent collectors, jobs unpopular with others. Inevitably, Jews were then hated for demanding money which was owed, and some massacres were encouraged by nobility who owed money they could not repay, so their debts were in effect wiped out. Of course, ordinary people hated the Jews who collected the rent and taxes, rather than the lords on whose behalf they were doing the collecting.
Jewish stereotypes and particular professions
Apart from these professions, Jews had to find ways to earn a living that could be taken with them when they were expelled or had to flee. Hence, from medieval times onwards, there were few farmers, but skills that required knowledge in the mind, or tools that could easily be carried, were valued, as something that could be taken with them wherever they fled. This meant that Jews became physicians, silversmiths and goldsmiths, experts in the manufacture of silk material, tailors, and so on, and the stereotypes we see today are based in truths about the work that Jews specialised in for lack of others being open to them.
And so we come to Zionism, which is a key issue in the current problems and debates around antisemitism. It is not surprising that, given all the persecution and expulsions, the wrecking of individual and community lives across the Ashkenazi Jewish area of Germany and central Europe, that some Jews began to fantasise about a place where they could be safe and free from fear.
The Bund was a Jewish socialist grouping
Some Jews had already moved to Palestine from where Jews had dispersed, voluntarily or forcibly, from the time of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE through the Roman occupation of the region. As the pogroms grew and became frequent, the idea of Zionism took hold among many groups.
Zionism was never a single unified organisation, nor was it something that all European Jews adhered to. Many Polish Jews, for example, were socialists and members of the Bund, which had no interest in religion and were clear that where they lived was their country – as their Yiddish slogan stated, Dortn vu mir lebn–dort is unzer land.
The Bund was dedicated to socialism, multiculturalism, secularism, and internationalism and they worked for the liberation of those suffering oppression, exploitation and discrimination, and supported all who were fighting for equality, human rights and social justice. In Germany, many Jews had worked hard to become part of German cultural and intellectual society and saw themselves as Germans first and Jews second. They were not members of Zionist groups.
We know what happened next – the rise of Hitler, the Shoah or Holocaust, and in the aftermath of such death and displacement, the unsurprising if disastrous push for the founding of the state of Israel as a place where Jews could be safe. Zionism did not originally intend the formation of a state, merely the idea of a homeland, a place where Jews could live, but the realities of the time focussed political intention on a state, which was declared on 14 May 1948.
I’m not going to go through the history that followed: of war, of a move from a socialist vision, to where we are now. If any socialist doesn’t feel a deep sense of unease, at the very least, about the policies of the current state of Israel, the treatment of Palestinians, etc, then I’m not sure what makes them a socialist. To remember the slogan of the Bund – always with the oppressed, never with the oppressor. This does not mean I think the Palestinian groups have always behaved well, politically or otherwise, but there’s no difficulty in seeing where the power lies.
Britain made a mess of its Palestine ‘mandate’
However, we have a major problem. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, even if we find its democracy more than lacking. It has elections, it has a government theoretically responsible to its whole population. It also has nuclear weapons. For these reasons, combined with Britain’s sense of responsibility for the utter mess it made of the Palestinian mandate – even if never said out loud – and the influence of evangelical Christianity in the USA, among other things, the so-called ‘western powers’ have by and large been supportive of Israel.
The greatest Zionists are the Christian evangelicals, who have pushed the USA into totally uncritical support, because their religious belief is that the second coming can happen only when all the Jews have returned to Israel. In their fervent support of the country, they somehow forget to mention that when their saviour comes again, those Jews who don’t instantly convert will be condemned to eternal hellfire…
And this is how we come to have the situation we are now in, where the term antisemitism has all too often been conflated with anti-Zionism, in its current meaning of support for the state of Israel. It is a classic antisemitic trope of the late 20th and 21st century to see all Jews as supporters of Israel rather than of the country where they live, and then to extend that to understand all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. This is of course nonsense.
For many, Israel was the best option
About 60% of Jews in the UK would say they are broadly ‘pro-Israel’, not least because most of us have relations who live there, often survivors of concentration camps or displaced people with nothing left at the end of the war, or those who did not find as friendly a place as they had hoped for in the UK or USA and decided in the 1950s or early 1960s that taking advantage of their right, as Jews, to become Israelis was the best option.
It also gets complicated because we use the term all Isra-el to refer to Jews the world over, and hence many Jews react to criticism of the state as if it were to Jews. But this sort of support does not mean being entirely comfortable with what happens there, and clearly does not indicate a wish to live there, nor any form of loyalty to the state in preference to the UK.
As for the other 40% – we are appalled by the modern state of Israel, even if we once supported it, shocked by the Israeli government’s policies towards non-Jews, the ascendancy of the right-wing ultra-Orthodox rabbis who regard women as second-class citizens and non-Jews as not worthy of respect (which is an appalling betrayal of basic Jewish ethics).
We are disgusted by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who is friendly with Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and an overt anti-Semite and right-wing racist. We are beyond disgusted by the Jewish Nation-State law passed in the Israeli Knesset in July this year – a law which states that the whole of former Palestine belongs to Jews, makes Hebrew the main official language, demoting Arabic, says the right for national self-determination there is unique to the Jewish people, thus demoting the claims of longstanding non-Jewish populations, including Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, the Druze, and the Bedouin.
And yet, somehow criticism of the state of Israel for its policies has become seen as ‘antisemitism’, a horrible mirror-image of the antisemitic assumption that all Jews support Israel and owe loyalty to it. And Jews in the Labour Party are being accused of antisemitism, which seems beyond nonsensical, but is happening frequently – because, of course, we criticise Israel, often trenchantly.
Vague and woolly definition of IHRA
So what is antisemitism, and how can we define it and make sure that genuine antisemitism is removed from Labour? The simplest statements are often the best: “Antisemitism is the hatred of, prejudice against and hostility towards Jews AS JEWS”. And yet somehow, we have over two years reached a definition that is so vague and woolly that it needs examples to elucidate it, with those examples being problematic – this definition has been held up as the only right way to define antisemitism. I refer, of course, to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. How this wording has come to have the status of sacred text is a strange story.
The definition reads: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” Kenneth Stern, the US attorney (and a fairly right-wing character) who originally drafted it, has pointed out that it was written as a working definition for the purpose of trying to standardise data collection about the incidence of antisemitic hate crime in different European countries. It had never been intended as legal or regulatory device to curb free speech. There was a discursive explication attached to the definition, with eleven examples which might, it was suggested, in particular contexts, be illustrative of antisemitism. Seven of the eleven examples referred to Israel and not to Jews. It is a vague and rather weak document, open to misinterpretation and misuse.
And yet, somehow, by its attachment to the words ‘Holocaust Remembrance’, it has acquired an untouchable status. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA, is a 31-nation inter-governmental organisation, largely European, with Argentina, Canada, the USA and Israel. A May 2016 press release states that the definition had been adopted, although, there is no formal record of such a decision, and the press release includes those eleven ‘examples’ which, it turns out, were never even discussed at the IHRA meeting.
Despite this rather odd situation, a reverent attitude to the wording, not merely of the definition but of the examples, seems to have taken hold.
IHRA is not a proper definition for legal purposes
Even the two-sentence definition is not helpful in any way. Geoffrey Robertson, a renowned legal scholar with expertise on human rights and free speech, has said that: “The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is not fit for any purpose that seeks to use it as an adjudicative standard. It is imprecise, confusing and open to misinterpretation and even manipulation. It does not cover some insidious forms of anti-Semitism.”
A number of other legal authorities have also pointed out that it is not a proper definition for legal purposes. And yet, somehow the Labour Party was made to feel ashamed for not taking on the entirety, examples included, of the IHRA definition, even though it has been used to limit free speech about Israel and its government’s policies.
The Labour Party has been accused of tolerating antisemitism, of being a hotbed of antisemitism, and Corbyn has been accused of being an anti-Semite. After the Conference in Brighton in 2017, a Brighton councillor claimed there was such terrible antisemitism at the Conference that he would ensure the party was never permitted to hold its conference in Brighton again. I was there – he was talking rubbish, but it was widely reported.
What didn’t get reported was that the original venue for the launch of Jewish Voice for Labour was cancelled after the venue received calls and emails claiming that it would be a dreadful antisemitic meeting – and that seems to indicate how threatening a Jewish organisation that doesn’t kowtow to ‘loyalty to Israel’ is, among some parts of Labour. The great thing was that, as a result, a very much larger venue had to be used and it was full to the rafters, making for a truly memorable launch.
Over a hundred antisemitic incidents a month
It is true that antisemitic incidents are being reported at the rate of one hundred a month in 2018, but it doesn’t take much thought or observation to see that the rise of the far right might be connected to antisemitic graffiti, hate mail and social media posts, as well as the violent assaults, direct threats, incidents of damage and desecration of Jewish property – including gravestones – which make up a quarter of the incidents reported.
I would never pretend that there is no antisemitism of any sort in the Labour Party – it would be astonishing if something so widespread in society were not present among Labour members and left-wing people in general. But the IHRA definition really doesn’t help. Liberty even passed a resolution saying the guidance and examples conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism and is being interpreted to say that calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or describing Israel as an apartheid state would be antisemitic.
The motion also points out that the IHRA blurs previously clear understandings, and the way it is being used threatens freedom of expression. They regretted that some local authorities had adopted it – and this was before Labour did so.
We can only tackle antisemitism in the context of anti-racism
To come back to where I started – placing antisemitism in the context of racism in general. You will remember the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed eleven people on 27 October this year. Robert Bowers didn’t kill these people merely for being Jews, but because he hated Jewish organisations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, because they were dedicated to helping immigrants and refugees. This highlights that we can only tackle antisemitism within a framework that includes all forms of racism including prejudice against migrants.
There are the specific prejudices, conspiracy theories and general nonsense that accrue to Jews because of our history, but of course other specific prejudices, conspiracy theories and nonsense are also directed at Muslims, and yet different ones at black people from the Caribbean, and from Africa.
To conclude, antisemitism is a real problem and it needs to be clearly understood if we are to tackle it. We need to understand that it is just one form of prejudice, of racism in its widest sense, and is not about political criticism of a particular country. To help in the fight against racism we need to understand antisemitism and what it really means, and to fight racism we need to stand together. Jewish Voice for Labour’s statement on antisemitic misconduct gives probably the best outline and I commend it.
December 31 2018
