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”
meqmac
Actually, plenty of Muslim historians agree that he married A’isha when she was 6 and consummated the marriage at nine. There are many apologetic accounts of how this was possible, justifying it on the grounds that it was the norm in Arabian society of the time. You may be confusing the marriage (under 9) and the consummation.
verticalaudio
This article is helping keep me sane. On Twitter I’ve just been called a racist because i challenged the left’s support for Hamas as an undemocratic, racist, illiberal, regressive force. My abuser said: “I don’t believe that the oppressed have a responsibility to choose representation congruent with my ego-ideal.” I feel like we’ve fallen into a rabbit hole of political nonsense that desperately just wants to shout out “I hate bloody Jews and Israel alike”, but knows it probably can’t.
James 'Jamo' Moulding
I think I would rather have a decent shot at some type of left-leaning socialist Labour Party or even government, than focus on issues like this. Israel bombs the shit of the surrounding regions and treats palestinians like subhumans… Groups like Hezbollah fight them and wage war – it’s a vicious circle – at the very least he has a better understanding of it than anyone else, but would you rather Yvette Cooper and austerity lite to Jeremy Corbyn, really?
Ed
And how many Jews want to expel the others from it, eh? And why are all the non-Jews in Gaza denied a vote? I guess that doesn’t matter because the others are all Islamic baddies.
Duncan_McFarlane
Tell
me why it is, if it’s impossible to negotiate with Hamas, that lots of
former heads of Israeli intelligence agencies, like Efraim Halevy, the
former head of Mossad, and Shlomo Gazit, the former head of Shin Bet
(Israeli Military intelligence) say Israel’s government can and should
negotiate with Hamas without preconditions like full recognition?
Negotiation is a possible route as many senior members of Hamas have made statements like “The Charter is not the Koran. Historically, we believe all Palestine
belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about
political solutions … The realities are different…I don’t think
there will be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis. (Mohammed Ghazal 2005)
In April 2008 Khaled Meshal of Hamas said
Hamas would accept the result of any referendum of Palestinians that
decided to accept Israel’s existence, including on some land taken in
the 1967 war.
In January 2009 Ghazi Hamad of Hamas said “We accept a state in the ’67 borders…We are not talking about the destruction of Israel.”
Now you might legitimately point out that sometimes they have said the opposite, in Arabic, to their own supporters – but the same is true of the Irseli Prime Minister and his government ministers. In a speech during the last Gaza “war”, Netanyahu , talking in Hebrew, made it clear there would be no sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank, ever, while he was PM, by saying “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.”
Naftali Bennet said in January 2013 that
“I will do everything in my power, forever, to fight against a Palestinian state being founded in the Land of Israel”
Yari Leven, the Likud chairman in the Knesset in January 2013 said “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”
Uzi Landau, then Israeli Minister for tourism said “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.”
Ze’ev Elkin, then foreign Minister of Israel, said in July 2012 that “This
is 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”
Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Deputy minister for Transportation, said in December 2012 that “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”
Avi Wortzman, Deputy Minister of Education, said in February 2013 that “The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. We oppose a two-state solution”
And every Israeli government calls the West Bank – all that’s left to form the core of a Palestinian state (and then only if the settlements were withdrawn and Israel stopped annexing more of it) – “Judaea and Samaria” – the Biblical name of the area at the time of the biblical Kingdom of Israel – which makes them just as much religious fanatics claiming “God gave the land to our religion by right of conquest” as any Islamic Jihad loon.
Israel has offered the Palestinians nothing so far in negotiations – a few Bantustan inner city islands of territory surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli troops, with Israel controlling the vast majority of vital farmland and water supplies in the West Bank – and no soveriegnty – no control of their own territory in military or legal matters for the Palestinians, so no security whatsoever. Israeli troops can go into Palestinian territory at will and arrest anyone and jail them without any more than a military court martial – or sometimes no trial at all. But no Israeli can be charged or arrested by Palestinian police or courts for anything they do in nominally “Palestinian” territory.
And unarmed Palestinian protesters, or kids throwing stones, are routinely shot dead with live ammunition by Israeli forces even in the “peaceful” West Bank. Like the two shot dead just before the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli soldier before the last Gaza war
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/12/autopsy-palestinian-teenager-wounds-consistent-live-ammunition
On top of that Israel refuses to allow any Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes during the 1948 or 1967 wars to return, or any of their children or grandchildren claiming “we’re a tiny country and can’t absorb those numbers” while simultaneously having a “Law of Return” that allows anyone who is Jewish, has a Jewish partner, or one Jewish grandparent to become an Israeli citizen no questions asked.
And you call all this “generous”?
And since when did Israel implement UN Resolution 242’s terms itself? Never. It has never withdrawn to the pre-1967 war boundaries as resolution 242 says it should. And even Hamas are not demanding exactly the pre-1967 boundaries – they are prepared to negotiate on the final borders, but the Israeli government won’t.