My review of Asa Winstanley’s ”Weaponising Anti-Semitism”

On Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender to the Israel lobby

I had always dismissed Bernie Sanders as a useless coward, but I was extremely hopeful when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the UK Labour party in 2015. Unlike Sanders, Corbyn had a long and impressive track record of opposing western imperialism. I followed his five years as Labour leader very closely. I started to lose hope in 2018, and by 2019 came to see Corbyn as a disastrous leader both morally and strategically. With hindsight, the kind of politician who would not get kicked out of Labour or resign during Tony Blair’s blood-soaked rule was unlikely to have the courage and insight needed to transform the party, or even reform it significantly.

Asa Winstanley’s assessment of Jeremy Corbyn’s capitulation to the Israel lobby is unflinching but never bitter even though Winstanley was himself targeted by the anti-semitism smear campaign against Corbyn and his supporters. His book addresses the argument that Corbyn’s shifting position on Brexit was more central to Corbyn’s demise. The smear campaign - thanks to Corbyn’s pitiful response to it - made him look weak, shifty, and untrustworthy. It therefore undermined his credibility on every issue. Winstanley cites polling that suggests how generalized the impact of the anti-semitism smear campaign was on Corbyn’s image as a leader. 

“Weaponising anti-Semitism: How the Israel lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn” highlights key moments show where Corbyn showed he was not up for the job of reforming the Labour Party: 

In hindsight, Corbyn’s backward trajectory on Palestine began almost as soon as he became leader. Only a few weeks in,  he went to a Labour Friends of Israel event … expressing a fundamental misunderstanding of the  nature of political power …

No matter how much Corbyn tried to pander, the Israel lobby always refused to take yes for an answer. Instead, they pocketed Corbyn’s concessions and demanded more, and more, and more—until they finally got what they wanted with Corbyn’s exit

Indeed, three years later, in the summer of 2018 three pro-Apartheid Israel newspapers in the UK would simultaneously run editorials declaring Corbyn “existential threat to Jewish life”. Winstanley recounts how (shortly after the unhinged editorials were published) one anti-Corbyn Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, “told one journalist that her situation in the Labour Party was similar to that of Jews under Nazi Germany."

Weaponising Anti-semitism discusses how Apartheid Israel’s supporters pressured Corbyn to crack down on comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. Hodge’s invocation of the Nazis illustrates the kind of grotesque double standards that Corbyn and his team tolerated: Nazi comparisons were fine provided they attacked the apartheid state’s critics, not Apartheid Israel itself.  I would add that this is also due to the way Hitler is so frequently portrayed as a freak who appeared out of nowhere and not as he really was: a western imperialist and fanatical anti-Marxist who stands out because he brought the west's genocidal practices to twentieth century Europe rather than restrict them to colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas.[1]

In fact, Winstanley’s discussion of the Haavara agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist Association for Germany (ZvfD) is only one example of the common ground Hitler shared with other western imperialists. It was Churchill, not Hitler, who said “"I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe in the ultimate partition of China. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph."   

Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London and a key Corbyn ally, was hounded out of Labour for daring to bring up the Haavara agreement. Livingstone was sloppy in some of his public remarks for example - appearing to suggest that Hitler’s genocidal intentions towards European Jews developed while he was in power. In fact, in Mein Kampf, Hitler was explicitly genocidal towards Marxists, and the Soviet Union, but Hitler also made clear throughout Mein Kampf that he saw Marxism as a key part of a jewish quest for world domination. There could be absolutely no doubt what he wanted to do to jews. [2]

Corbyn should have corrected Livingstone’s errors while emphasizing and expanding on what Livingston got right: the ample common ground that Nazis shared with other western imperialists, including, of course, zionists. Instead, Corbyn denounced Livingstone’s comments as “grossly insensitive”.  Winstanley commented “"Why should the grassroots stick with the leader when the leader seemed so ready to sacrifice the troops?” It was not only grassroots supporters and key allies but Palestinians whom Corbyn ultimately betrayed. In 2018 Corbyn would say that “Labour is a political home for Zionists and anti-Zionists. Neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism is in itself racism”            

In short, Corbyn became too insensitive and cowardly to distinguish between a form of racism (Zionism) and a form anti-racism (anti-zionism). Winstanley describes how this political cowardice and lack of understanding repeated itself when oher allies were driven out of the party Chris Williamson. Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker. 

Weaponising Anti-semitism reveals how shockingly often jews were targeted by the anti-semitism smear campaign if they dared to defend Corbyn. Winstanley noted “Jewish anti-Zionists in Labour were habitually targeted ... Their identity was no protection. Indeed, media coverage often stripped them of their Jewish identity altogether”.  I would add that this contrasts dramatically with the way Zelensky’s jewish identity is used to deny the obvious sway that neo-Nazis have in Ukraine since they spearheaded a US-backed coup in 2014. 

A lesser book would only have directed fire at key Corbyn “allies” who pushed him to surrender to the Israel lobby: John McDonnell, Jon Lansman, the Novara media crowd, Jennie Formby among others who are discussed. Thankfully, the book does not deny or downplay Corbyn’s culpability at all. 

Winstanley should have mentioned an infamous interview McDonnell gave to Alastair Campbell in 2019 in which John McDonnell scoffed at the idea that Tony Blar was a war criminal. Denying that Blair is a war criminal is downright racist, never mind “insensitive”, and Corbyn never denounced it. [3] Nevertheless, Winstanley made it utterly clear that Corbyn's deficiencies as Labour leader were moral as well as strategic.  For example, Winstanley wrote that 

Probably the greatest single moral failure of Corbyn’s leadership came in 2018 with the Hajo Meyer incident. Meyer was a Holocaust survivor who in 2010 had been the main speaker at a meeting chaired by Corbyn in Parliament… titled “Never again: for anyone.” Meyer and the other speakers argued that the lesson of the Nazi Holocaust should be a universalist one: that we must act to prevent the horror of such unspeakable crimes being carried out against anyone…

The Times decided that a twisted version of events could form another useful attack on the Labour leader, claiming the meeting had “compared Israel to Nazism.” …

…instead of defending Meyer—a Jewish survivor of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp—Corbyn distanced himself from the dead man and apologised for once offering solidarity

What if, as Winstanley argues in the book, Corbyn had fought back forcefully against the smears by using independent media, and in some cases the courts? Personally, I now feel that could only have worked if Corbyn realized that he needed to do to his enemies within the party what they did to him: wage an all out war to purge them. Like his enemies, Corbyn and his supporters needed to understand that losing elections was part of the cost of getting that done. Fortunately for the British Establishment, that idea never occurred to Corbyn no matter how wildly he was attacked.

As I already mentioned, it was probably too much to expect from a politician who was long been content to be a isolated dissident within an imperialist party. I argued in a recent piece about dissenting votes by a small number of Democrats in Congress: they are tolerated to herd leftists into a party that actually despises them so they can remain harmless. But Corbyn accidentally landed in a position where he could have been far from harmless to western imperialism. The anti-semitism smear campaign was an effective way to restore him to his role of providing token dissent- albeit not as an MP for the party from which he has still not resigned.     

  

NOTES

[1] See my review of Mein Kampf for discussion. Hitler’s anti-semitism was inseparable from his anti-Marxism.  On western coddling and collaboration with the Nazis see a long Twitter thread I did on the flawed but very useful book by Nicholson Baker:  “Human Smoke”

[2] Some quotes from Mein Kampf that I included in my review make this point undeniably clear:

“On the day when Marxism is broken in Germany the chains that bind Germany will be smashed forever” 

“Marxism[’s] final objective was and is and will continue to be the destruction of all non-Jewish national States…” 

“... the life-work of the Jew, Karl Marx. His Capital became intelligible to me now for the first time. And in the light of it I now exactly understood the fight of the Social-Democrats [9] against national economics, a fight which was to prepare the ground for the hegemony of a real international and stock-exchange capital”

“The struggle against the Jewish Bolshevization of the world demands that we should declare our position towards Soviet Russia.”

“Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews”

[3] Aaron Bastani of Novara Media initially praised McDonnell’s interview then added feeble criticism after receiving flak for praising it.