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”
maleredfem
How much influence do you think those people have in today’s Tory party?
Duncan_McFarlane
Arab citizens have equal rights in theory but not in practice. No Israeli Arab politician or party has ever been allowed to be part of a coalition government in Israel. In the recent election Netanyahu had an election broadcast in which he pointed to a map and warned that “Arab voters are advancing in large numbers towards voting places” – as if this was a military threat.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/inyamin-netanyahu-israel-election
Peaceful , unarmed Israeli Arab demonstrators can be shot dead by Israeli armed police units with impunity and no consequences, as they were during the Al Aqsa Intifada in 2000, including Aseel Asleh, a 17 year old member of the Seeds For Peace group which includes both Jews and Arabs. Others were shot dead while merely looking into the street from thee balconies of their own homes.
http://www.seedsofpeace.org/?page_id=3783
The only Israeli soldier to be jailed for the targeting of civilians in the last several decades was a Bedouin Arab – all the Jewish Israeli soldiers get off with no charge or minor charges.
During the recent Gaza conflict under Netanyahu, Israel’s supreme court ruled that the government had no responsibility to provide bomb shelters for Israeli Bedouin Arabs of the kind it provides to all Jewish Israeli citizens. With immense hypocrisy the ruling was on the basis that the Bedouins villages are supposedly “illegal settlements” – but settlements in the West Bank all get state funded bomb shelters.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/state-not-obligated-to-fortify-bedouin-communities-court-rules/
And no every civilian death is not a victory for me – where did you pull that nonsense from? It’s a victory for the extremists on both sides, like Netanyahu – and the only way to stop civilian deaths is for the Israeli government to take the advice of Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad; Shlomo Gazit, the former head of Shin Bait, Shlomo Ben Ami, former Israeli foreign minister; Israeli academics like Yossi Alpher and Avi Shlaim; and many others – and sit down and negotiate without preconditions with the entire elected Palestinian government – Hamas and Fata – without preconditions. The war criminals and the terrorists need to sit down and negotiate peace, as so many Israeli experts say they should.
Duncan_McFarlane
It existed as something other than a Jewish state before there was any Kingdom of Israel. And it existed as something other than a Jewish state under the Persian Achaemanid Empire, and the Seleucids, and the Romans, and the Byzantines, and the medieval Arab kingdoms. There was that huge yawning 2000 year gap between the fall of the biblical Kingdom of Israel and the 1947 War of Independence, which makes any claim that Israel always existed as a state throughout history ludicrous.
It’s like Italy laying claim to the whole of Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa on the basis of an Empire gone for 1,500 years. Or modern Assyrian Christians in Iraq demanding rule over the former ancient Assyrian Empire. Or Denmark demanding its territory extend into the Viking age Danelaw in England.
From the 7th century AD on the population of Palestine (it had been the Roman and Seleucid and Byzantine province of Palestine, not Israel, for centuries even before that ) was mostly made up of Arabs, most of who were Muslim. There were a few sephardic Jews left, but they were a minority, up until the Zionist settlers started buying up land and coming as immigrants from other countries in the 19th century.
The only legitimate claim to any territory that Israel has is the 1947 UN Resolution which provided for Jewish and Arab (i.e Palestinian) states alongside one another, dividing up the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine roughly equally.
Jason Schulman
“The article is incredibly dishonest for two reasons. Firstly Corbyn is not an anti-Semite or standing on an anti-Semitic platform and Johnson can only imply that he is; secondly Johnson, despite claiming to be of the left, would never support Corbyn unless he was a pro-Israel chauvinist like himself. Nevertheless, this slander has made it into the rightwing press, which is happy to join in the smears.” (http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1063/register-for-corbyn/)
Jason Schulman
Does Alan really still stand by what his views were in 1998 (see: http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/12/16/other-trotskyists-and-palestine)? I have my doubts.