It is easy enough for democrats to take sides on the current war between Hamas and Israel on the basis that Hamas won't hold elections while Israel must do so. Hamas is an offshoot of a Leninist organization- the Muslim Brotherhood- which considers the ballot box un-Islamic. Worse yet, it considers the people it rules to be mere pawns to be sacrificed for the greater objective of establishing an Islamic Caliphate. Israel may have its right wing, but it remains a democracy and Israeli politicians do have to spend some time on bread and butter issues or else face the order of the boot.
Jon Lansman, former director of Momentum, takes a different view.
To speak out as a leftwing Jew on any aspect of this century-old conflict is to risk isolation and hate from both sides.
The traditional left-wing Jewish position was that Religion is the opium of the masses. Palestinians would cease to be Muslims or Christians while Jews would give up the Torah. Israel would become a Socialist State where everybody would starve to death while displaying great solidarity and saying 'boo to neo-liberalism!'.
I suppose this is what Lansman will now do.
That much I know, having directed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaigns
Corbyn snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for Labour. It left this country saddled with the most amateurish Cabinet in living memory.
and called out the antisemitism of that period.
Which has probably increased.
So, on 8 October, absorbing the emerging details of the Hamas massacre the previous day, I feared the consequence of speaking out again.
A previous Labour government had classed the military wing of Hamas as a terrorist organization. Since the recent atrocities were endorsed by the political wing, it would be acceptable to say that Hamas as a whole is committed to terrorism to gain its objectives. The problem is that it is likely to lose a shooting war and thus lose its its grip on Gaza. Previously, it had been chased out of Egypt and, two years ago, it appeared that Erdogan had given up on it and would crack down on its operatives as a way of improving relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I suppose that is what prompted this strike which was also a way of commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war.
The Left is welcome to say 'Hamas is right wing and is sacrificing the Palestinian proletariat so as to ingratiate itself with the corrupt theocratic plutocracy in Iran. The working class should unite against such Fascist organizations. It should build lateral ties between working class communities regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality and whether or not one's head is actually a cabbage.
It turned out that in such circumstances I could not have been in a more supportive place during the Labour party conference than at a joint-faith meeting organised by a Jewish and Muslim women’s group in a Liverpool synagogue. Grief shared in such a setting was great comfort and some relief for all of us together – Muslims and Jews.
Sadly, it was wholly irrelevant or ineffective with respect to events unfolding thousands of miles away.
It used not to be difficult to support both peoples who live in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as I did, by distinguishing their needs and aspirations from those of their leaders.
Will Lansman say Hamas is a Right Wing terrorist organization?
But the rise to power of former rightwing terrorists Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir
both of whom won the Nobel Peace Prize
to the highest office in Israel was where a supremacist philosophy began to take hold in the politics of Israeli Jews.
It was also when Israel started to turn the corner economically thanks to Reagan's 'tough love' which forced it to dismantle its sclerotic Socialist system.
It appealed, as far-right politics always do, to those who felt let down or ignored by their governments, as Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern or north African heritage) and more religious Jews did by the secular Ashkenazi (European) Israeli Labor Party establishment.
Begin did gain votes by embracing religion but corruption scandals involving the Left-wing Establishment helped him to gain power.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza also began to lose trust in their leaders from Fatah and the Palestinian Authority who were seen as self-serving, even corrupt – a shift that benefited more religious candidates and Hamas.
The Hamas leadership in places like Doha aren't exactly short of a bob or two. The hope was that 'religious candidates' would serve as the anchor for a Centre Right party which would encourage private enterprise. Sadly, the Brotherhood's Leninist structure made it myopic, opportunistic and an unreliable partner in coalition politics. In Israel, politicians have to be a little more pragmatic and willing to compromise on 'ways and means'. Still, there are some systemic problems in Israeli society- e.g. a somewhat dysfunctional educational system for the majority.
Tensions increased within and between both communities.
However, the Israeli left is not without its share of responsibility. In Israel’s prehistory, those who led the Jewish government-in-waiting before the state’s establishment observed the Holocaust from British-administered Palestine. Their attitude to the 6 million murdered and the 1 million survivors who found their way to Israel can be characterised by the phrase they used to describe the manner of their deaths: “They went like sheep to the slaughter.”
To be fair, Jews needed to assure the Allies that the existence of 'hostages' in the hands of Axis powers would not cause them to violate embargoes on trading with the enemy. The bigger problem faced by Israel was that the Brits were in no position to assure them of even a small pocket of land. Either the Israelis could defend themselves or they must evacuate the area as best they might. By contrast, in the sub-continent, Britain was handing over competent professional armies to the two successor states.
A contempt for weakness was embedded in the Israeli left, which now in the hands of its far-right successors, has created a culture of permanent war that is supremacist and authoritarian towards Palestinians. A culture mirrored by Hamas.
The big difference is that Jewish terrorists aren't killing other Jews for ideological or religious reasons. Nor are Hindus for that matter. But in Pakistan and Gaza this does not appear to be the case. The wider context of the current conflict is a rivalry between Shia and Sunnis in the region. Hamas, though Sunni, is acting as Iran's cat's paw. Might this cause Sunni powers to quietly revive support for ISIS type outfits? The plain fact is, the greatest numbers of deaths and displacements and destruction of infrastructure are occurring in Islamic countries where there is sectarian conflict. Gaza may be rebuilt quite quickly if Hamas collapses there. But what of Syria?
It is tempting to blame persecution by 'Secular-Socialist' Arab nationalist parties- e.g. Assad's massacre of the Brotherhood in 1982- for the paranoid mind-set and Leninist structure of Ikhwan offshoots. Still, we have to admit that when Morsi got his chance in Egypt, he made a complete mess of things. Getting elected doesn't mean you automatically become capable of running things properly. Here in the UK we have an extraordinarily incompetent Cabinet where Minsters appear to be using politics as a springboard into the world of reality TV. It turns out that politics isn't about ideology. It's about governance.
And so, in the war that was certain to follow the Hamas attacks, how can a leftwing Jew best maintain support for both peoples when your family, friends and comrades take opposing sides?
I do so by pretending to be a cabbage which aspires to become a twerking TikTok sensation.
These two peoples are crammed into a tiny space in the former British mandate of Palestine, about 7 million of each. Each of them astonishingly resilient after almost a century of conflict. Wars. Terrorism on both sides. Shoah and Nakba. Pogroms and “transfer”. And each side with leaders they would do better without. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ismail Haniyeh. Lions led by donkeys.
Haniyeh lives in Doha. The Americans believe Abu Marzuk, deputy chair of the Hamas Political Bureau is worth $3 billion, while senior leaders Khaled Mashal and Ismail Haniyeh are each worth about $4 billion. No doubt, they are doing well out of the current carnage in Gaza. Netanyahu, poor fellow, is only worth about 80 million dollars. Israel's GDP is half a trillion which is more than Iran which is much bigger and has a lot of oil. Israelis, it seems are industrious, and their leaders live among them and have to deliver better governance or risk getting booted out.
I immersed myself at an early age in the history of centuries of Jewish suffering. Expulsion from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492 alongside the Muslims. On and on until the ultimate destruction, before, finally, sanctuary arrived with the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine and create a refuge for Holocaust survivors.
But the UN wouldn't send troops to safeguard that refuge.
In the UK, Labour’s conference had supported partition, especially the left. The Attlee government ignored the conference – some things don’t change. It resisted partition, pleading its duties as the mandate authority.
Why? Israel might become economically viable and politically cohesive. The Palestinian areas could not. The Brits hoped the Jews would subsidize their Palestinian neighbours but those neighbours wanted them gone.
I do not accept the official narrative curiously shared by both Zionists and anti-Zionists that Israel was created because of a chain of events from Theodor Herzl’s inspiration through to Balfour’s declaration and the UN partition.
Britain acquired Palestine by military conquest and became the mandatory power there. It needed to find a way to finance its occupation. Jews had money. Palestinians didn't and, in any case, wanted the Kaffirs to just fuck off and die. Though the Brits did restrict immigration to placate the Arabs, in practice any Jew with 500 quid in assets could settle there. This is because the Mandatory power needed to raise money through taxes. Post 'Geddes axe' (i.e. cuts in military spending) and the 1919 agreement such that the Government of India would be reimbursed at a handsome rate for the use of Indian soldiers in the MENA, Britain had to count the pennies and do things on the cheap.
It was driven more by guilt than principle: no one would take the Holocaust refugees, and there was no other option.
The Brits would have kept them out if it had paid to keep them out. They took them in because the Jews paid their way. Money matters. Guilt does not.
To have the Holocaust now often thrust in your face by people on the left as a reason for your failure to have “the right line” on Israel (whatever that means) is hard to take.
The 'right line' is to demand all immigrants- especially those with names like Rishi Sunak or Suella Braverman should just kindly fuck off back where they came from. Sadly, immigrants do useful stuff and create wealth and pay taxes. That is the dilemma of the Left. In principle golden geese are very fucking evil due to they are probably Neo-Liberal and Patriarchal and say nasty things about homosexuals. Still, if you need golden eggs to cover the deficit, you are stuck with the bourgeoisie, and the immigrants and the Church and even the fucking Crown which appears to bring in lots of tourist dollars.
In the 1960s, the left backed Israel.
Which did appear pretty left wing.
Aged 10 in 1967, I cut out news stories each day of the six-day war.
After Israel's victory, Harold Wilson had to change tack to protect British financial interests in the region. Eshkol, the Israeli PM, called the drunkard George Brown- Wilson's foreign secretary- an enemy of the Israeli people.
In 1973, Israel, caught off guard by Egyptian and Syrian forces in the Yom Kippur war, was again the underdog, supported in Britain by the Labour opposition but not by the Heath government. The fact that Israel was still being attacked by its neighbours 25 years after it was established as a refuge for Holocaust survivors
People like Eshkol had come to Palestine before the Great War because they were fleeing Tzarist pogroms. Lansman forgets that the Brits had had to impose immigration restrictions on Russian Jews in 1905. Pretending they could flourish in 'a land without a people' was a way of appeasing those who sympathized with the persecuted East European Jews without actually letting them come to settle in East London. Incidentally, a Gujarati member of parliament- Bhownagree- supported the 'Aliens Act'. He was a Priti Patel avant la lettre.
is the root of my sympathy for the Jews of Israel/Palestine, the people, but not necessarily for their government.
I don't have any sympathy for anybody at all. But I appreciate that the country needs people who will work hard and set up businesses and pay taxes.
History itself is a weapon in the present. My generation remembers when Israel was led by the left and supported by the left elsewhere.
My generation didn't think Wilson was Leftist though he did try to reduce Income inequality. Sadly, the voter didn't give a fuck about inequality. They wanted a strong pound so as to drink plenty of cheap Sangria in Franco's Spain. BTW Wilson supported America in Vietnam because 'you can't kick your creditors in the balls'. On the other hand, the SAS were rooting Commies out of Borneo and MI5 was helping keep Malaysia safe from Sukarno and his Commie pals.
My children’s generation see an Israel where there is not a sizeable left to speak of.
Because the Left strangled the economy. It turned out that the Israelis, like Da Valera's successors, preferred affluence to puritanical austerity.
I might have no religious faith and I do not believe that the land was given to Jews by anyone other than the UN,
No. They were allowed to buy land by the Ottomans and then by the Brits for fiscal reasons. People with money can pay taxes. Tax revenue is needed to keep up a semblance of government. The UN was wholly irrelevant. The plain fact is that both the US and the Soviets, for very different reasons, supported the creation of Israel and, thanks to the influx of battle hardened East European Jews and arms shipments gained by various devious means, the country was able to defend itself. Also, it was lucky the Jordanians kept out of the conflict so as to concentrate on taking over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But the Hashemites had bitten off more than it could chew. Neither Egypt nor Jordan want to take back the Palestinian areas they controlled after 1948. More importantly, they don't want to take in any Palestinian fleeing Hamas.
but I celebrate the same festivals they do and eat the same food. I still feel an affinity I cannot explain.
I can. The gentleman is Jewish. He likes Jewish festivals and Jewish food. He feels affinity with Jews because he is Jewish.
There is no military solution to this conflict.
Military conflicts have military solutions. In this case, Hamas gets to keep its TV stations etc in Turkey while its leaders get yet richer. I suppose, the Israelis will recoup their losses by taking a percentage on the humanitarian aid that will come flooding through. The settlers will continue to grab land. By the end of the decade, Israel will be exporting robotic technology which enables them to cheaply seal up Palestinian ghettos.
But 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians are not going to go away. They need leaders who will work for peace, and bring Palestinians and Israelis together. There can be no role for those who want perpetual war.
If there were a way to become a billionaire promoting peace, Hamas's leaders would have found it. Sacrificing Palestinian lives and territory is more profitable for the Brotherhood and its Iranian backers. Money talks. Bullshit walks.
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