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”
Rabbi Burns
1. Arab citizens have the same rights as all other citizens of Israel. They have fewer responsibilities. They also have much greater rights than the Arabs living under Fatah or Hamas – never mind the rest of the Arab world and never mind the rights of Jews in the rest of the Arab world (your original point being about “moral superiority” after all). They also have the most valuable passport in the region and thus are free to “escape” at any time if they are not happy with their lot. There are no queues to leave and very few Israeli Arabs state that they wish to se the border redrawn so they become citizens of an Arab state (even fewer mean it).
2. Whatever the facts are in the cases where Arab demonstrators are killed by Israeli forces – Jewish and otherwise – your original point, about “moral superiority”, requires us to compare those cases with the treatment of peaceful, unarmed Jewish protestors in Arab-controlled areas or countries. How do they fare? In fact, rather than covering up the murder of Jewish civilians, Arab governments actively promote those murders, celebrate the killers and provide lavish pensions and honours for those arrested before, during or after attempts to commit those murders. All this despite the fact that there are now zero or close to zero Jewish civilians in any of those territories and they have to penetrate Israel – or Jewish communities abroad – to carry out those murders.
3. Israel is the only Jewish state in the world surrounded by hostile Arab states and with a partially problematic Arab minority of its own. If there is discrimination against Arab soldiers in the Jewish army, how does it compare with the discrimination against Jewish soldiers in the Arab armies?
4. Those Bedouin Arabs are living in illegal communities *according to Israeli law*. If you want an Israeli bomb shelter you have to qualify under Israeli law. Israel is attempting to create recognised communities for these people with infrastructure that would include public bomb shelters, yet that too is apparently unacceptable for some. If the Bedouin wish to live in unrecognised communities they can use the money they save on council tax to build their own bomb shelters. Meanwhile, to go back to your original point, how is the bomb shelter provision for Jews in the Arab territories? That’s right, there is none. In fact at least two Arab governments are pointing and firing missiles at Israeli civilians and not caring whether they kill Arabs, either in Israel or their own country, in the process. Many more civilians in Gaza are killed by misfired rockets and “work accidents” than in Israel. But then, they are a useful sacrifice, especially if they can be added to the numbers that Israel is blamed for.
5. Yasser Arafat once said that 99% is closer to 0 than 100%. It is impossible to negotiate a genuine peace with people who think in this way with a “phased plan” mentality. Only a fool would turn a blind eye to that and it is true there are some in the Israeli establishment who cannot face that bitter reality. Besides, who would you negotiate with? Fatah, Hamas, the Salafists, IS? The current Arab factions cannot even create a united front against Israel and if they do the only common ground is annihilation of Israel, which means an agreement between all three – Israel, the kleptrocrats and the theocrats – is impossible. Even if it were possible, how would you enforce the agreement when Hamas and then IS takes over? How would you stop the missiles being fired and the tunnels being dug? The creation of a new Gaza in the whole of Judea and Samaria would lead to a massive conflagration and ultimately “nakba” 2 – which would be one alternative to the current status quo, if people are tired of that.
Also, do you really believe that Fatah would actually want an independent state? The moment it was announced, “Syria”, Jordan and Lebanon would expel all their UNRWA beneficiaries to go and live in this new “state”. Neither the PLO nor Hamas can bring themselves to “naturalise” the “refugees” who already live in Gaza and Areas A an B! You really think they want an extra few million poor and unskilled citizens to spoil the nice little earner they’ve got going? What would happen to UNRWA with no more refugees? What happens when PLO-land is expected to balance its books like every other country in the world? I suppose they could do what they did originally – sell the land to the Jews.
One Israeli academic who has, as far as I can see, a more realistic proposal is Dr Mordechai Kedar, professor of Arabic at Bar Ilan University. He has a website palestinianemirates.com and several of his lectures are on YouTube. While the Jordanians and Abbas recently stated that Jordan and the Palestinians are “one body with one spirit” and “one people living in two states”, that is obviously not the case as the conflict between Fatah and Hamas illustrates. I think the emirate model is more likely to create the conditions for (relative) peace and stability.
Tel
Letter is a disgrace, pity he did not apply the same logic to war criminal blair and his support of Israel and there terrorist politicians.
Perhaps his work for Israel foundations and corporations coloured his judgment
Toby
Yes, I too was shocked to read Owen Jones’s recent piece in support of ISIS’s right to drop gay people (like himself) from the top of 30-storey buildings.
Or, without sarcasm, what bollocks. None of the people you name – well, perhaps Galloway, but then he’s less a person than a walking ego – in any way ‘sides up’ with Islamofascism. They simply point out that naming it a ‘global Islamist movement’ is absurd: it’s more akin to organised crime than organised religion, which has a tendency to crop up in power vacuums, with predictably dreadful consequences for the people in the region. It’s well documented, for example, that many leaders in ISIS come from Saadam’s Baathist regime, whose secular politics should by all rights be anathema to ISIS’s supposed vision of a Sharia caliphate. But all parties are perfectly happy to ignore such contradictions as long as they’re able to use radical Islam as an ideological cover and recruiting tool to pursue what they’re really after – wealth and power.
And let’s not forget what created the power vacuum in Iraq that allowed this criminal gang to grow to such a size in the first place…
So the ‘radical left’ isn’t ‘siding up’ with Islamofascists. It’s just doing what it’s always tried to do (frequently quite badly, admittedly): unveil simplistic right-wing narratives that aim to create scapegoats and distract people’s attention from the oppression they face in their own country. The fact that you’ve swallowed these narratives leaves you in no way qualified to criticize others on the ‘far-left’, near-left, middle-distance-left or whatever else you may wish to name it.
CBinTH
Good reply
JAMES MCGIBBON
Duncan you have just articulated my point. The SNP are a right wing anti socialist party pandering to the rich for funding. They can unfreeze the council tax and do have tax raising powers. They want to lower corporation tax which would cause England to respond.
They have powers for land reform yet they pay the landowners a fortune for placing wind turbines at taxpayers expense. The SNP are con merchants and obscene and will eventually be exposed.
At least the Tories are honest thieves.