David Rosenberg – Public Reading Rooms

Why we should follow yesterday’s instructions for overcoming fascism today

David Rosenberg — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 14:32:05 +0000

DAVID ROSENBERG explains how the far right can be defeated by learning the lessons of the past

Last summer, Britain’s seemingly disparate far-right forces took anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigners by surprise by filling Whitehall with 15,000 people.

They were there to support Tommy Robinson, temporarily held in prison. The emotive themes he had articulated in sound bites in recent times had infiltrated the consciousness of those who took to the streets that day.

That single mobilisation eclipsed even the best-attended National Front rallies of the late 1970s, which rarely surpassed 3-4,000 but caused havoc in immigrant communities. You have to go back to the 1930s to find a similar number mobilised by the British far-right. In 1934, 15,000 people of all classes packed London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre in London. Most of them were avid followers of Oswald Mosley’s vision for Britain and members or supporters of his British Union of Fascists.

Among those in Olympia yet to make up their minds, were 150 MPs underwhelmed by what passed for mainstream politics.

There were also interlopers — up to 100 anti-fascists — who obtained tickets through a clever deception and spread themselves around the hall. In the violence that followed their attempts to heckle, 80 were thrown out bloodied and beaten.

That night Mosley’s thugs won the physical battle but anti-fascists won the propaganda war. The defections Mosley suffered as his brutal methods were revealed forced him to reorientate his movement. It built a new powerbase in working-class districts in London’s East End, surrounding the struggling Jewish ghetto in Aldgate and Whitechapel.

The Battle of Cable Street that took place in that area in 1936 remains a touchstone for anti-racists and anti-fascists today. The size of the mobilisation, the drama of mass blockades and barricades, the clashes with the police, and the incredible people’s victory when fascist movements were advancing in so many European countries, are still recalled as an inspiration to anti-fascists to take to the streets today.

But the ultimate victory over the fascists in 1930s Britain was based on more than one major battle, crucial as Cable Street was.

We can still learn today from the range of strategies through which the far right were undermined. While the informal political alliance that mobilised people to flood the streets against Mosley’s fascists was important — local branches of the Communist Party, Independent Labour Party, Labour League of Youth, rank-and-file trade unionists, and a militant grassroots body that emerged from the community most under attack, the Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Antisemitism (JPC) — it was a shared strategy of building an anti-fascist majority locally that was crucial.

This meant recognising that everyone had an active part to play — that a genuinely collective struggle would be far more effective than individual or top-down efforts. It meant acknowledging that the enemy was fascism rather than individuals living hard lives attracted to the fascist flag in the absence of convincing alternatives. The anti-fascist movement recognised that it needed to embed the fight against anti-semitism in the fight for jobs, for education, for better housing, for better lives for all.

While the counter-movement confronted the organised attempts of fascists to march and spread propaganda, it made a conscious effort to win hearts and minds among those who were heading in a fascist direction. It understood that this was not simply a moral issue — saying that anti-semitism was “evil” — but about showing how the fascists were also using anti-semitism as part of a wider attack on democracy that would affect everyone.

Although anti-semitism impacted primarily on Jews, the JPC argued that the “struggle against anti-semitism is as much a task for the British people as a whole as for the Jews, and the struggle against fascism is a task for Jews as much as for the British people as a whole.”

In Britain today, Muslims much more frequently bear the brunt of vicious attacks by racists and fascists, though we should recognise that fascists can attack many targets at once, and a range of migrant and refugee communities also receive their negative attention, boosted by the government’s hostile environment and continuing institutional racism.

The far right accumulate rather than replace targets and anti-semitic incidents are rising once again, not just here, but elsewhere in Europe, especially in Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, and also in the US.

Populist far-right forces, globally, in 2019, are making deeper and deeper inroads into working-class communities, and not just on a narrow propaganda of hate based on stereotyping.

Attacks on women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, and defence of the “Christian” family also play well for them especially in central and Eastern Europe. We need to spread awareness of the wider set of themes on which they are recruiting and recognise the extent to which they are using online platforms to win support. Our responses need to be smart and collective, but also consciously draw on the insights and strategies of the past to confront the dangers of today.

David Rosenberg is the author of Battle for the East End and Rebel Footprints.

From one hostile environment to another: can you spot the difference?

David Rosenberg — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 21:47:35 +0000

Source: Rebel Notes

We need some perspective about where the real boost to the antisemites, racists and fascists in Britain and the wider world is coming from.

Last weekend far-right, identitarian and neo Nazi activists from several European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain Sweden, descended on the Bulgarian capital Sofia. They were joining their local Bulgarian counterparts, who included Kruv i Chest (Blood and Honour), National Resistance and Byal Front (White Front) for the annual “Lukov March”, commemorating Hristo Lukov leader of a pro-nazi Bulgarian Legion, who was assassinated by two Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans in February 1943.

The two partisans were Ivan Burudzhiev who fired the first shot, and Violeta Yakova, a Sephardic Jewish communist who fired two more shots and killed him after the wounded Lukov fought back and shot Burudzhiev. Yakova was later hunted down by the Bulgarian security forces (she had also assassinated the pro-Nazi chief of the Bulgarian police). In June 1944, she was captured, tortured and killed in the city of Radomir, After the war she was recognised as a “national heroine” and a memorial statue stands in Radomir today

There were hundreds of counter-protesters organised through Antifa Sofia. They confirm that alongside openly Nazi parties there were participants from IMRO – the Bulgarian National Movement, who are part of the United Patriots alliance that is a partner in the Bulgarian government. More significantly for anti-racists and anti-fascists in Britain, IMRO are a junior partner in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group of the European Parliament that is dominated by Britain’s Conservative Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party – a party that has antagonised Jews within and beyond Poland with its Holocaust revisionism and outlawing of narratives that suggest there was collaboration by some Poles with the Nazis as they exterminated Jews. The Bulgarian IMRO have helped to mobilise for the Lukov march, alongside other ultra-nationalists and open antisemites for several years running, yet they were welcomed into the Conservative Party’s European-group in 2014 by David Cameron.

Since Theresa May became leader in 2016 she has not questioned the participation of IMRO in this group, but has the gall to throw cheap accusations at the Labour Party, with regard to antisemitism, despite the Labour Party’s long record of involvement in anti-racist and anti-fascist causes.

The number of far-right and openly Nazi groups participating in the Sofia march last weekend (some of whom are banned in their own countries) is testimony to the alarming growth of Islamophobic, anti-Roma and antisemitic forces across Europe – all of them boosted since Donald Trump’s election in America, and benefiting too from Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon’s growing operations in Europe.

Statistics from surveys in many countries have shown a rise in antisemitic incidents ranging from physical threats and violent assaults, daubings of synagogues and cemeteries, to verbal abuse and incitement on social media. In pretty much every country around the world concern about this is expressed first and foremost towards the governing party in each country, the people with the power to take action internally against far right groups, to undertake educational work, and to exert an influence on the national atmosphere towards one that promotes respect for minorities.

It is absolutely astounding that in Britain, where antisemitic incidents have been growing year on year recently under the watch of a Tory government, infamous for the hostile environment it has operated towards migrants and refugees, aided and abetted by the pro-Tory press, that undoubtedly boost the rhetoric of Far Right ideologues, that the fire has been misdirected away from the Tory party and towards the Labour Party. It was misdirected there again yesterday, as one of the excuses for their door-slamming exercise by the Independent 7 who have splintered from the Labour Party.

They began to plan their departures in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, a democratic decision that they refused to accept then or in 2016 when he was emphatically elected again by the membership. And while they were busy calling the party they have just left, “institutionally racist and antisemitic” at their somewhat shambolic launch, one of their number, Angela Smith, made a disgraceful racist comment. Equally disgracefully, the figure among the 7 who has made the biggest noise around antisemitism (Luciana Berger) has not even commented on her colleagues remark, which was broadcast live yesterday.

That is not to say there are no incidents connected with Labour Party members. There have been many allegations, though 40% of the incidents reported to the Labour Party since April last year, for which Labour members were being blamed, were found to have nothing to do with any Labour Party members, and in a further 20% of cases the investigations found no evidence of a case to answer. In the remaining 40% of cases, mostly to do with social media comments, including hyperbolic comments about the Israeli government and military’s racist and repressive actions, there have been a range of sanctions and 12 members were expelled.

Such hyperbolic comments, sometimes mixed in with antisemitic tropes, are undoubtedly hurtful and need to be exposed and challenged. They also taint rather than help the Palestinian cause they allegedly support, but can anyone seriously suggest that such social media comments compare in any way with the Tory Party’s openly hostile policies towards the Windrush generation and a range of migrants and refugees, that have seen them lose their livelihoods, become destitute and face forcible deportation, or that they can compare with the Tory Party’s verifiable links and collaboration since 2014 with a party that has participated with neo-Nazis marching in Sofia not just last weekend but for several years in a row. We need to call out antisemitism wherever it appears, but we also need some perspective about where the real boost to the antisemites, racists and fascists in Britain and the wider world is coming from in 2019.

David Rosenberg is an anti-fascist historian and activist.

Holocaust – what’s in a word? Why the naming of the nazis’ horendous crimes is controversial

David Rosenberg — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 17:08:39 +0000

Source: Morning Star

The promotion or discouragement of certain terms reflects competing claims for ownership of the memory associated with this history.

As we mark Holocaust Memorial Day this weekend it is worth noting that the term “Holocaust” was not widely used by writers and scholars until the 1960s and was only one of several words that have described the extermination of an estimated six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and around one million Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) by azi fascists between 1941-5.

One million of those Jews were slaughtered in mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen (SS and police units aided by local collaborators) who swept through areas of the USSR that the nazis invaded from June 1941. Many others died from starvation and disease in walled ghettoes in which the nazis incarcerated them. The majority, however, were industrially murdered in a network of specially constructed death camps.

The nazis harnessed the skills of architects, scientists, engineers and administrators to carry out this horrendous crime, while businesses profited from supplying poison gas.

The thoroughly evidenced facts of the Holocaust are uncontroversial for most, though the ranks of Holocaust sceptics and deniers are growing. But the naming of what happened is controversial.

The nazis themselves chillingly described their actions as the “Final Solution” (Endlosung) to the “Jewish question.” Early nazi rallies featured a slogan: “The Jews are our misfortune,” but their project of mass murder began, on a smaller scale, with a different group.

Around 275,000 disabled people in Germany and Austria were murdered by lethal injections or poison gas at “euthanasia centres” under the secret T4 programme initiated in 1939. Trade unionists, political opponents, gays and others deemed “asocial” or “inferior” perished in large numbers too, through starvation and mistreatment in concentration camps.

Every victim must be mourned equally, but to understand the process we must recognise that the specific intention of wiping out whole peoples applied only to Jews and Roma/Sinti, and, within Germany and Austria, to disabled people too.

The term Holocaust, from French via ancient Greek, means “wholly burnt,” but it carries connotations of “sacrifice.”

Some fringe religious-zionists believe that the “miraculous” creation of Israel compensated for the “sacrifice” of diaspora Jewry. For others, “Holocaust” is an iconic, mystical term indicating an event outside of history, beyond previous scale or comprehension.

The survivor Elie Wiesel, who died in 2016, described what occurred as a “madness” for which the only appropriate response was “silence.”

The combined Jewish and Roma/Sinti victimhood at the hands of the nazis was actually exceeded by two other major historical events.

One was the destruction of native South American peoples, principally by the Spanish. A 70-million-strong population before Columbus was reduced by disease, enslavement and murder over the next 150 years to three million. Many died young, mining the gold and silver that adorns Latin American churches and underpinned Spain’s economic development.

Several African historians use a Kiswahili word, Maafa (disaster), to describe the second, also termed the “Black Holocaust.” From the 15th century onwards, many millions of African slaves died in captivity, en route to the Americas, or through mistreatment there by Europeans.

“Genocide,” the term academic historians prefer, coined by a lawyer Rafael Lemkin during World War II, had certainly occurred before the 1940s, and continued afterwards.

The nazis’ killing programme against the Jews began in 1941 in the context of a war of expansion. It was marked out from other mass killings not only by the systematic industrial methods of slaughter designed by highly qualified people, and gruesome medical experiments, but also by the maintenance of detailed records of present and planned future victims.

None of the words chosen to describe the nazis’ programme are free of ideology. The promotion or discouragement of certain terms reflects competing claims for ownership of the memory associated with this history.

By the mid-1970s, a Hebrew word, Shoah, was widely used, popularised further through Claude Lansmann’s eponymous 1985 documentary. Its literal meaning — catastrophe/calamity — lacks the sacrificial connotations of Holocaust, but still carries considerable ideological baggage.

Its elevation represents the Israeli state claiming ownership of Jewish history. Ironic given the zionists’ extremely patchy record of opposing anti-semitism and nazism in the 1930s, and given the present day embrace by arch-zionist Benjamin Netanyahu of European leaders who promote far-right ideologies and hatred of minorities today, while restoring the image of home-grown anti-semitic movements of the late 1930s and early ’40s.

Israeli spokespersons using the term Shoah are not looking towards the Jewish community alone. They would prefer non-Jews to see the destruction of Europe’s Jews through Israeli eyes. This reflects the historiography that Israeli schools promoted in the 1960s, that disparaged diaspora Jews for going “like lambs to the slaughter.”

It ignores the powerful resistance to anti-semitism in Poland before the war led by anti-zionist Jewish socialists (Bundists) supported by non-Jewish Polish socialists. It downplays the resistance of many Jews in ghettoes and even in the concentration and death camps, or falsely claims that such resistance was led by zionists alone.

Zionist ideologues regard the fate of the Jews under nazism as proof of the failure of diaspora. If a Jewish state had existed in the 1930s, they say, more Jews would have been saved. The fate of Palestine’s Jews during the war, however, hinged on the battle of El Alamein. If the nazis had reached Palestine, Jews there would have shared the same fate as their relatives in Europe.

And besides, however many Jews would have found sanctuary in Palestine, that would not have changed the fate of a million Roma/Sinti being targeted for slaughter alongside Jews for exactly the same reason.

So what terms have the victims themselves chosen? Until quite recently Roma and Sinti have favoured the term “Porajmos,” of Romani origin, which means “devouring.” But there has been a backlash among Romani-speaking activists, especially women, because this term also has connotations of rape, so some prefer the term samudaripen (mass murder).

Among Jews, both Holocaust and Shoah have marginalised the Yiddish word “khurbn,” used in Yiddish memoirs by survivors. Some 15 per cent of Yiddish words derive from ancient Hebrew — khurbn (destruction) is one of them.

Its earlier use referred particularly to the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Most of Hitler’s Jewish victims were Yiddish-speakers. The nazis were determined to destroy Yiddish culture as well as Jewish people.

It is surely more appropriate to use a term derived from the victims’ principal language rather than the Hebrew term Shoah which now dominates the discourse.

In contrast with calamity or disaster, destruction implies agency. As does genocide — my preferred term alongside khurbn.

Genocide assumes perpetrators and victims. The genocidal intent to destroy entire peoples indicates a spectrum that includes ethnic cleansing, while distinguishing itself from random attacks and massacres.

Survivors and their families insist that the full truth of what happened to them and their communities at the hands of the nazis should be known and attempts to distort, trivialise, marginalise or deny that history should be resisted.

For some Jews, the term “genocide” detracts from the uniqueness of what occurred under nazism, though the further we move through the 21st century, the more I fear that its methods and processes will prove far from unique.

Better, then, that we locate its memory within history, within the reality of what rational human beings have done and are capable of doing in pursuit of ideologies of extreme nationalism and notions of superiority and inferiority.

The nazis were fascists, helped into power in 1933 by capitalists in crisis. But the seeds were sown long before, and not just in Germany. The urge to conquer, to suppress, to exalt the nation, to dehumanise others, had long been powerful ideas in European cultures and will surely reappear in new contexts for a long time to come.

Our task today is to recognise danger signs at an early stage and find strategies to confront them, in whichever continent they emerge, and whichever nation or culture is exalted or detested.

David Rosenburg is a participant in the conference No Pasaran: Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right in London on 2 March 2019. He wil also be the guide for an Anti-Fascist Walk tracing the history of the 1930s resistance to Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in London’s East End.

What can we learn today from Britain’s first anti-fascist street battle?

David Rosenberg — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:48:00 +0000

Source: Rebel Notes

The fascists were beaten back in the 1930s but they have returned with new names, new flags; Britain First, English Defence League, The Football lads Alliance…

A long neglected piece of radical working class and anti-fascist history was movingly celebrated at a ceremony in the Market Square of Stockton on 9 September 2018. In September 1933, it was one of several small towns in the North East of England devastated by the economic depression that was targeted by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists for recruitment to his street army and political project. The 30 or so members of the fascists resident in Stockton were joined by 100 more drawn from other northern towns and cities. They planned to march along the high street and then rally in the Market Square by the Town Hall. Local anti-fascists had got wind of this but the police hadn’t. Barely a handful of police were present when the BUF were ambushed by more than 2,000 anti-fascists drawn from the Communist Party, Independent Labour Party, National Unemployed Workers Movement, Labour Party and trade unions. It was a violent clash. The BUF rally was closed down and their activists chased out of the town.

A plaque was unveiled on 9 September by Stockton’s mayor in that same Market Square, who spoke of her pride as a trade unionist in the anti-fascist spirit of resistance that day. She was one of several platform speakers, which included local MP Alex Cunningham, Jude Kirton-Darling an MEP for the North East region and granddaughter of a Czech-born Holocaust survivor, and Marlene Sidaway, of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, born locally, whose late husband fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

This was David Rosenberg’s speech.

I am so honoured to be here for this commemoration of the people of Stockton who understood so early on the danger posed by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and showed by their collective action that they had no use for fascism.

Mosley could only hope to build a movement at a time of crisis and the key to that crisis was unemployment. In 1929 Britain’s unemployment reached an unprecedented total of 1.5 million. 2 years later doubled 3 million – 20% of the workers nationally, but we know it was not evenly spread. Everywhere was hit badly, but nowhere worse than the northeast where in some parts it 80% of the workforce were out of work.

In October 1932, the same month that Mosley created the British Union of Fascists, there was a conference in East London about unemployment, organised by father Groser, an Australian born Anglo-Catholic priest, who studied theology in Yorkshire and would go on to play a key part in the anti-fascist movement. In his earlier days Father Groser acknowledged that his political ideas were conservative and imperialist. All that changed with his first placement – in a slum parish in Newcastle. And everything he learnt in Newcastle about supporting the poorest people, he brought with him to London’s East End.

In his conference invitation Groser described the effects of long-term unemployment: “physical depression, ill-health, frustration of personality, the loss of proper self-respect, which created an embittered and hopeless section of the community.”

People devoid of hope were ripe for receiving fascist messages that promised to make them feel good about themselves and their country again. Mosley denounced the political system of democracy that, he said, had created the crisis and given us the tired old gang of politicians who could not navigate their way out of it. He promised strong and effective government unencumbered, as he put it, by a daily opposition.

Like other fascist leaders in Europe – he portrayed himself as a saviour and redeemer who would fight for the disempowered and disenfranchised, and make the country great again. The day his party was formed he launched a book called The Greater Britain, but it was really about the greater Mosley.

He made a special appeal to youth, saying his party alone would offer young people a chance to serve their country in times of peace, not just as fodder in times of war. he promised a party of action that would mobilise energy, vitality and manhood to save and rebuild the nation.

Between 1932-34 the BUF built a national infrastructure of 500 branches and that included fascist groups in Newcastle, Sunderland, Gateshead, Durham and here in Stockton.

In the North East and in south Wales, Mosley’s movement made an appeal to miners; in Lancashire they sought support from Cotton workers, in south-west England it was farmers. In many small towns Mosley sought support from small shopkeepers and the lower middle class. He appealed to the unemployed, especially those who served in wartime but were now on the scrapheap.

In London, by contrast, he sought out the wealthy and powerful. In late 1933, three months after the events in Stockton, that he won the support of one of the most powerful people in the land, Lord Rothermere – the publisher of the most widely read newspaper in Britain the Daily Mail.

Unlike other political movements who tried to capture town halls and parliament they tried to capture the street. Mosley told his followers that they were invincible, that the streets belong to them, and that is why the courageous actions of people in Stockton were important.

You recognised what his movement was about very early on and showed that Blackshirts were not welcome here. Other parts of the country took longer to wake up to the menace of fascism. They thought Mosley had something to offer.

In London in 1934 he held a huge rally in London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre. It was packed with 15,000 people. Among them were 150 members of parliament looking for inspiration. Members of the House of Lords came in Blackshirts. They had already been inspired. But there were also protesters – thousands of them outside the venue – mobilised by the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party, but also protesters inside, who obtained tickets in an interesting way. The Daily Mail ran a competition and you could win £1 and a ticket to a Mosley rally if your letter was published in the Daily Mail but for the purposes of this competition your letter had to begin with the words: “why I like the Blackshirts”. Anti-fascists wrote spoof letters, got tickets and forged more.

When Mosley walked up to the platform through a guard of honour with a spotlight on him he had no idea demonstrators were inside as well as outside, but he had 1,000 uniformed, jackbooted, stewards, just in case.

Just three minutes into his speech a protester stood up and shouted “Down with Mussolini, down with Hitler, down with Mosley, fascism means hunger and war” and sat down again. Every three minutes a protester stood up with a similar heckle, until Mosley gave a sign. The next time it happened the heckler was yanked out of their seat by 15 fascists who beat the living daylights out of him in front of everyone Mosley wanted to impress. It was a chaotic and violent evening – 80 protesters needed hospital treatment. And amid the violence, Mosley made his most anti-Semitic speech to date.

It needed both a physical and ideological response. Stockton had shown the way in terms of a physical response. That was repeated in three other northern towns – Liverpool Manchester and Leeds. But the biggest confrontation would come in October 1936 in London’s East End, when a march and show of strength by 4,000 fascists, protected by 7,000 police, was stopped by around 200,000 people taking to the streets mounting a mass blockade of the streets the fascists wanted to march through then putting up barricades in Cable Street the alternative route.

In Cable Street two remarkable things took place. The first two-thirds of Cable Street was mainly Jewish the last third mainly Irish. Two poor communities bordering each other. Mosley tried to win Irish catholics against their Jewish neighbours. The anti-fascists had tried to unite both communities against the fascists. On the day Irish people came from their end of Cable Street to help Jews building barricades against the fascists.

The second remarkable thing – the first barricade was a truck on its side. The police could not see beyond it, but other barricades were built behind reinforced with furniture. Eventually the police dislodged enough of the first barricade to run through and check if they had a clear path, but they got stuck between that barricade and the next one. Women in flats above the shops saw this, picked up everything to hand in their kitchens, and rained down on the police. With resistance from above and at ground level they had to retreat and tell Mosley he could not march.

1930s rent strike

Stockton was a battle, Cable Street was a battle, but the war against fascism in 1930s Britain was ultimately won on housing estates, especially in East End, where anti-fascists helped to set up tenants defence committees to bring the communities that Mosley had tried to divide with hate – the Jewish and the Irish – into a common fight for better housing. The unity and solidarity they forged made it much harder for the fascists to get a hearing among them.

In an age of plenty when each person felt secure and valued and none experienced pangs of hunger and resentment, Mosley’s malicious sentiments would have floated away with the wind. The beliefs of his movement could only manipulate people’s consciousness when there was profound and pernicious social inequality, in a society beset my mass unemployment, low pay, poor housing, poor access to education, neglect by those with power and wealth, a widespread hopelessness, and a longing for personal and national salvation. Such problems though are not confined to the past.

The fascists were beaten back in the 1930s but they have returned with new names, new flags; Britain First, English Defence League, The Football lads Alliance, National Action… If we are to stay true to the traditions of resistance established in Stockton and in Cable Street we must stand not just against fascism but every manifestation of racism and authoritarianism that feeds it, and work to strengthen an anti-racist and anti-fascist majority in our society. No Pasaran! They shall not pass!

The Young’uns – The Battle Of Stockton (Live)

Two of the award-winning group the Young’Uns are from Stockton. Their song, The Battle of Stockton, is dedicated to their grandfathers who said no to Mosley’s fascists.

A plea to Jeremy Corbyn from a Jewish socialist who shares the same desire for social justice

David Rosenberg — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 20:07:43 +0000

Source: Rebel Notes

The false outrage of a few loud, but actually unrepresentative, self-defined Jewish leadership bodies, top-heavy with Tory supporters, must be confronted.

It is surely getting near to the time when Jeremy Corbyn will need to call their bluff. Whose bluff? The self-proclaimed and self-important leadership of the Jewish community, who don’t want to talk to Jeremy at all – they just want to talk at him. When Jesus said “It is better to give than receive”, the Board of Deputies thought he was talking about “advice”. They want to humiliate him. They want to drive him from office, to save Theresa May’s bacon (or salt beef, if you prefer), and keep us all nervous about discussing the rights of Palestinians.

But he’s got to speak to Jewish leaders – we elected them. Didn’t we? No, very few of us Jews did that. Jewish Leadership Council? Unelected. They just announced themselves. Chief Rabbi? No, appointed not elected. Campaign Against Antisemitism? Where the hell did they come from? Completely unelected. Ah, but the Board of Deputies – some of them are elected. No? Well, in theory, yes. If you are a member of a synagogue you might get a vote, but in some synagogues not if you are a woman. How many elections are contested? What percentage of voters take part? When did your synagogue last change its deputy? What – as long ago as that? And then there are a lot of Jews are not members of synagogues. Hmmm, that’s a problem. And, at the end of the day, decisions of the Board are made by paid officers not ordinary elected members.

They talk in such portentous tones. But for them it is a sick game. Make a statement about this. Apologise for that. Get rid of this person from the Labour Party. Disown that one! ….antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism. Probably the least of their nefarious activities is how they have cheapened and devalued that term to the point where ordinary people outside the community are getting dangerously tired of hearing about it and might not react to actual cases.

There have been so many ridiculous allegations against Corbyn – the latest one about how offensive it was for Jeremy Corbyn to release his statement just a few hours before the Sabbath! (A bit like the Jewish Chronicle every week.) When I heard that one I really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I think I actually cried.

I cried for the ordinary people of Britain, who include a significant number of Jews, struggling to get by as the wealth gap increases. And I cried even more for the real have-nots, the growing number of homeless I pass in the street. The people in one of the richest countries in the world looking at the future with hopelessness and desperation.

I have heard Jeremy say on more than one occasion that if he becomes Prime Minister he would want to be judged first and foremost on what he had done for the homeless. Sadly he will have been the first Prime Minister to have had that priority.

How criminal would it be, if this autumn there was an election, but the current government of Foodbank Britain, Grenfell Tower, zero-hours contracts, the Windrush Scandal, of Yarls Wood Detention Centre etc. etc etc…(together with its bribed bigots of the DUP), continued to be in office because enough people had been brainwashed into not voting for Jeremy – the “fucking antisemite and racist” as one of his own MPs disgracefully called him? Or because so much possible campaigning time was wasted on the false outrage of a few loud, but actually unrepresentative, self-defined Jewish leadership bodies, who are a bit top-heavy with Conservative supporters in any case.

Those “leaders” could have met Jeremy last Friday at mid-day at the Jewish Museum (I was invited too). The Museum agreed after a little wobble, but as one of the main culprits, Jewish Chronicle editor, Stephen Pollard gleefully claimed in a tweet, many of them were emailing him to say they would boycott the museum if the meeting went ahead there.

Many more Jews, beyond those “leadership ” bodies could have met Jeremy to discuss matters three months ago, but the very same people complaining “But he won’t meet us”, made it clear that they wouldn’t attend if certain other Jewish groups (who they might have disagreed with) attended. The whiff of hypocrisy is in danger of becoming a stench.

I have this fantasy that Corbyn does meet these “leaders”, and they agree that he can set the agenda. He puts foodbanks at the top, then he poses the question: “What is the Jewish community’s view on foodbanks? Are they good or bad? What might be the best way of reducing the need for them without harming those who rely on them? And then he brings up transport, and asks for the Jewish community view on renationalisation of the railways, to which these leaders reply: “I don’t know really, we would need to talk to our communities, gather different views…”

And then he says quietly, “But you seem to know very well, without any consultation at all, what ‘the community’ believes about the IHRA examples, their attitude to Israel/Palestine, don’t you?”

Well it is just a fantasy. But it reveals a truth. There is a very great deal of point to Jeremy meeting with, and listening to, the issues and concerns of ordinary Jews, especially those Jews who he can find at least some common ground with. There are a lot of us about.

I can remember the day he was elected leader in 2015. Within minutes of the result being announced, he rushed off to speak at a huge demonstration on an issue that has been close to his heart for decades – supporting refugees. I may be wrong but I don’t recall his detractors (Hodge, Austin, Berger, et al) being there. But I do remember being part of a very large Jewish bloc on that demonstration, with a huge contingent from Liberal and Reform synagogues, especially younger people.

The Jewish bloc on the Refugees Welcome Here demonstration, September 2015

I know many of those Jews who have shared the same desire that Jeremy has displayed throughout his political career, for social justice, for community, for human rights, would relish the opportunity to sit down with him and give their range of perspectives on the issues that are being talked about in such a narrow and destructive way. For all the well publicised stories of Jews leaving the Labour Party, I know many Jews who have joined Labour since he became leader.

Back in April he had a very relaxed encounter with 100 young Jews. He spent four hours at a Seder night to mark the festival of Passover with them, and a few older ones (like me). But for his troubles he was denounced as an antisemite, and seen as particularly reprehensible by the Daily Mail for sitting on the same table as me (a “left-wing author”, no less.)

It was important that Jeremy has now made a public statement in his own voice on the painful current disputes. I have small quibbles with it, but in general I think it was a very good statement. It reassured Jews who wanted to listen. It set out in a very clear way his commitment to them as citizens, as members of a minority community, and as Labour Party members. It acknowledged communal diversity and the significant input of non- and anti-Zionist Jews in the party alongside those committed to Zionism. It argued forcefully that the perspective of Palestinians in the party should not be censored or penalised, and that anti-Zionism did not equal racism. He spoke of the recent killings of Palestinian civilians, and condemned the new Nation-State Law in Israel that has formally turned Palestinians and other non-Jews into second class citizens.

He openly acknowledged that the party faced some genuine issues around antisemitism but put it in perspective. The complaints – which must be fairly heard and more speedily – involve less than 0.1% of the membership. (Note to the press who talk of hundreds of incidents – these are complaints and allegations that have yet to be tested for the evidence).

I would have liked to have seen him develop the point near the end of the statement where he referred to the common threat to Blacks, Muslims, and Jews from the Far Right, here and in Europe. We urgently need to have strategy discussions on this among the threatened groups. Though if you saw how reluctant our “leaders” were to sit in a room with other Jews they don’t control politically, they would no doubt be even more nervous of groups outside the community. I can think of many Jews from a number of organisations who would jump at the chance to take part with the Labour leadership in constructive anti-racist discussions with representatives of other minority groups.

So my plea to Jeremy and his supporters for how we go forward from here, is quite simple: Get back to discussing and promoting Labour’s core issues over which it is at war with the Tories, in public meetings and open air rallies around the country, and, in the meantime, start to meet with those Jews who are sincere and not playing power games or using diversionary tactics that seem designed only to help Theresa May and Benjamin Netanyahu.

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