As the most left-wing candidate you should get my vote. But you won't. And here's why.
Congratulations!
By securing a place on the ballot to become the next Labour leader you have put a spring in the step of many party members and trade unionists who feel that you embody their values better than any other candidate. (You embody only some of mine, trampling on some others, but I will get to that.)
You represent a clear alternative to the suffocating consensus that says there is no alternative to neoliberalism: marketisation, deregulation, privatisation, financialisation, an assault on the bargaining power of labor, regressive tax regimes, and cuts to welfare.
You will not tell us to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting ‘filthy rich’ and you will not sneer at the trade union movement.
You are acutely aware that the transformation of European social democracy into a political force pursuing only a slightly kinder and a slightly gentler neoliberalism has caused the erosion of the emotional connection between the party and the working-class.
And you know that neoliberalism has eroded local democracy and the public realm, pushing aside actors other than those at the center, and then micro-managing Britain through a grim and relentless bureaucratising cult of quasi-government bodies.
On that basis you will secure the votes of many party members and trade unionists.
But you won’t get my vote.
You won’t get it because Labour’s best traditions also include anti-fascism and internationalism while your support – to me, inexplicable and shameful – for the fascistic and antisemitic forces of Hezbollah and Hamas flies in the face of those traditions. In particular, your full-throated cheer-leading for the vicious antisemitic Islamist Raed Salah is a deal-breaker.
Why did you lend your support to Raed Salah? No, he is not a ‘critic of Israel’, but a straight-up Jew hater.
You said in 2012, ‘Salah is far from a dangerous man’, even though the left-wing, anti-Netanyahu Israeli newspaper of record, Ha’aretz, reported that Salah was first charged with inciting anti-Jewish racism and violence in January 2008.
You said ‘Salah is a very honoured citizen’, even though Salah was found guilty of spreading the blood libel – the classic antisemitic slander that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make their bread. He did so during a speech on 16 February 2007 in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Wadi Joz.
I mean, just listen to Salah: ‘We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children’s blood’, he said. ‘Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the holy bread.’ (The UK Appeal Court decided that ‘We do not find this comment could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews.’ It also decided that this would ‘offend and distress Israeli Jews and the wider Jewish community.’)
You said: ‘Salah represents his people extremely well’, even though after the 9/11 terrorist attacks Salah wrote this in the October 5, 2001 issue of the weekly Sawt al-Haq w’al-Huriyya (Voice of Justice and Freedom): ‘A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.’
You said ‘Salah’s is a voice that must be heard’ even though he has called homosexuality a ‘great crime’ and recently [preached that ‘Jerusalem will soon become the capital of the global caliphate’ which will ‘spread justice throughout the land after it was filled with injustice by America, the Zionist enterprise, the Batiniyya, reactionism, Paganism and the Crusaders.’ i.e. everyone who does not follow his brand of Sunni Islam.
You said ‘I look forward to giving you tea on the terrace because you deserve it!’, even though the Islamic Movement [the northern branch of which Salah heads] has eulogised Osama bin Laden and Salah has incited Muslims against Jews by writing incendiary lies such as this: ‘The unique mover wanted to carry out the bombings in Washington and New York in order to provide the Israeli establishment with a way out of its entanglements.’ Who do you think he meant by ‘the unique mover’?
Why is that kind of conspiratorial antisemitism, dripping with threat and menace, worthy of tea on the terrace?
And it isn’t just a problem with Salah, is it? You said it was ‘my pleasure and my honour’ to host ‘our friends from Hezbollah and our friends from Hamas’ in the Commons.
Really?
Why do you not care that the Hamas Charter states that ‘Islam will obliterate Israel’ and enjoins all good Muslims to kill Jews, whom it blames for all the wars and revolutions in classic antisemitic fashion?
Why don’t you challenge your ‘friends in Hamas’ about the inclusion in their Charter of this canonical Hadith: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’
And why are Hezbollah your friends? They are an antisemitic Islamist goose-stepping ‘Party of God’ who persecute (and assassinate) liberals and democrats in Lebanon whenever they can. The Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said ‘If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.’ (NY Times, May 23, 2004, p. 15, section 2, column 1.) Your ‘friends’ were enthusiastically slaughtering Syrian civilians on behalf of the Assad regime long before ISIS or Jabhat Al-Nusra joined the fray.
Yes, you will say I am part of the Israel lobby and people should pay no heed. Yes, I work at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. But here’s the thing. I have the same views now about the Israel-Palestine conflict as I did when I was a member of the Socialist Organiser Editorial Board and you were with Labour Briefing back in the 1980s. (I think our two organisations may have even ‘fused’ at some point, though those days are a bit hazy now.)
My views have not changed since I was a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism. They are the same views I had when we debated each other at Birmingham University some years ago: I believe in two states for two people, a secure Israel and a viable Palestine, a democratic solution to an unresolved national question based on mutual recognition and support for the right to national self-determination of both peoples.
I edit a journal, Fathom, which publishes many voices critical of the current Israeli government, from the Israeli left, from Israel’s Arab citizens, and from Palestinians.
I just do not understand how you can support so unthinkingly those political forces which oppose to their dying breath everything – literally, everything – the labour movement has ever stood for: trade union rights, freedom of speech and organisation, women’s equality, gay and lesbian rights, anti-racism, the enlightenment, and reason.
But as long as you do support those forces you will not get my vote. As long as you do, I will just have to remain politically homeless. Which is a pity, because there you are on the TV screen, talking with élan like a proper social democrat about full employment.
I want to cheer you on. Can you respond in such a way that I can?
Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom – For a deeper understanding of Israel and the region, and works for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)
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497 Responses to “An open letter to Jeremy Corbyn”
Duncan_McFarlane
What i’m saying is that during a civil war encouraged by the US, Israeli and Egyptian governments – and a military occupation and blockade of the West Bank and Gaza, there have not been circumstances that would allow another election.
And what would the point of new elections be as long as Israel refuses to accept the result of Palestinian elections when it doesn’t like them?
Did Palestinians get a veto on serial war criminal Ariel Sharon being elected Israeli PM? No – and Israelis have no right to a veto on who Palestinians elect.
And i do not support either side without reservations – both include people guilty of terrible crimes. But there is nothing to choose between them in terms of morality or democratic legitimacy. The Israelis just have an immensely stronger military and are refusing negotiations in favour of annexing more farmland and more water supplies in the West Bank.
If you know the history you’ll know that when the Israelis didn’t have their own state or military they too used terrorist tactics, because they had no chance against the British military during the mandate of Palestine. Half the Prime Ministers of Israel have been people who were members of Zionist terrorist groups that targeted Arab and British civilians as much as combatants. For instance Yitzakh Shamir was a senior member of the Lehi terrorist group, who assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN peace envoy who had saved many Jewish families during the Holocaust.
Zapre
Or the police we’re in on it …hence the 20 police officers who were brought in for questioning .
Duncan_McFarlane
Israeli Prime Ministers and government ministers say a lot of things too.
“I will do everything in my power, forever, to fight against a Palestinian state being founded in the Land of Israel.” – Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor, January 2013.
“We are opposed to a Palestinian state… [Netanyahu’s declaration of support for a Palestinian state at Bar-Ilan University was] a tactical speech for the rest of the world. ” – Tzipi Hotovely, Deputy Minister of Transportation, December 2012.
“The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. We oppose a two-state solution.” – Avi Wortzman, Deputy Minister of Education, February 2013.
“In this way, we will try, slowly but surely, to expand the circle of settlements, and to afterwards extend the roads that lead to them, and so forth. At the end of this process, the facts on the ground will be that whatever remains [of the occupied West Bank] will be merely marginal appendages…” – Yariv Levin, Coalition Chairman in the Knesset for Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, January 2013.
“One thing must be clear: A Palestinian state is not the solution. The state of Israel made a harsh mistake when it created the impression that it is prepared to accept two states for two nations. ”- Uzi Landau, Israeli Minister for Tourism, May 2013.
“Thisis our land, and it’s our right to apply sovereignty over it. Regardless of the world’s opposition, it’s time to do in Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank] what we did in [occupied East] Jerusalem and the Golan.” – Ze’ev Elkin, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, July 2012.
“Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Liberation of parts of our land forever is the only thing that justifies endangering our soldiers in battle to capture land. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel.” – Op-Ed by Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, July 15 2014.
“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” Benjamin Netanyahu, quoted in the Times of Israel, 13th June 2014 (i.e no sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank)
And to judge from their actions, they don’t want peace – they want a continued conflict focused on Gaza in order to be able to continue taking more land and water in the West Bank.
WetWork
A two state solution is impossible until the Arabs, and the let, accept that there must be peace Israel and the Arabs. You, personally, are more corrosive to the final settlement than any member of Likud because you supply the ‘palestinians’ with what they least need, hope of eventual victory. You think that by supporting ‘palestinian’ hopes of genocide you are wrong an historical right, but you are in fact just another murderous antisemite who cares not a fig about the actual ‘palestinian’ people, or you would not give comfort to their fascist overlords.
After the fall o the Soviet Union I hope expect that the left would have a rethink and turn into moderate centralists, instead many just picked the next powerful group of evil bastards to support and so many of them cheer-lead for Jihadist, like HAMAS.
WetWork
‘And what would the point of new elections be as long as Israel refuses to accept the result of Palestinian elections when it doesn’t like them?’
Governments recognize states, not governments. Governments are at liberty to deal with governments however they wish, as was the case when the Austian led government of Jörg Haider came to power in 2000. I do not recall the left raising their voices to the 14 nation boycott of the Freedom Party of Austria’s government, but than again, although far-right, Haider was not particularly antisemitic.
HAMAS calls for the murder of all Jews and is quite proud of its murder of wholly innocent Jews.
You support these evil fascists, knowing their aim of genocide.
You do not support them because they are representatives of down trodden, you support them for their espoused aim of genocidal murder and the formation of a fascist dictatorship.
Odds are that you only support genocidal fascists who wish to murder Jews, but it is possible that you support other genocidal fascists who want to murder some other ethnic group.