Source If I am not For Myself (Verso Books)

“Mainly, what turned me into an anti-Zionist was just following events, and finding the pro-Israel narrative and its underlying Zionist claims unsustainable in the face of the evidence.”

Author and activist Mike Marqusee died on 13 January 2015 . Brought up in a Zionist New York family he moved to London in the 1970s where he joined the Labour Party and became a close friend and political ally of Jeremy Corbyn. He had by then rejected the Zionism of his family. A prolific author on a range of subjects, his powerful book If I am Not For Myself, published by Verso Books, describes the Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew. The extracts below are taken from the final chapter, which is titled Confessions of a “Self-Hating Jew”.

This is the Zionist modus operandi: character assassination, disinformation, denial, bullying, intimidation. These have for many years become the standard practices of many Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders, in both the USA and Britain, and no one on the left would deny its reality or shamefulness. Nor should anyone be scared off from indicting Israel for its crimes against Palestinians by charges of anti-semitism.

“Tsunami of anti-semitism”

In January 2006, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, warned that the Jews were threatened with “a tsunami of anti-semitism.” Sacks complained that Israel was being blamed for all the world’s problems, and that the Jews were being blamed for Israel. It was rich coming from someone who takes umbrage at “inappropriate metaphors” and “exaggerated criticisms” of Israel, while regularly trumpeting the unbreachable bond between Israel and the Jews of Britain.

Reading the US press you’d be forgiven for thinking that Britain was awash with anti-semitism, not as dire as in France, but boding ill. So just how bad is it for Jews in Britain today? The most concrete, though certainly not the only measurement is given by the Community Security Trust (the main body concerned with the safety and security of Britain’s Jews), which reports that in 2006, there were 595 anti-semitic incidents in the UK, the highest since the CST began keeping records in 1984. Of these, 112 were violent incidents, of which four involved intention to do grievous bodily harm or worse. Some 20 per cent—134—took place during the 34 days of Israel’s war against Lebanon. During the whole year, 54 incidents included specific reference to Lebanon.

“Left-wing anti-semitism”

What the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies and other pro-Israel voices are really preoccupied with is what they call “left-wing anti-semitism,” something unmeasured and unmeasurable by any of the CST’s current methods. According to the Chief Rabbi, “Modern anti-semitism is coming simultaneously from three different directions”: its traditional home on the far right, “a radicalized Islamic youth inflamed by extremist rhetoric,” and “a left-wing anti-American cognitive elite with strong representation in the European media.” Now just what stereotype does that last category smack of?

The thesis of a specifically “left-wing anti-semitism” relies on a politics of insinuation, the attribution of hidden or unconscious agendas. The hallmark of the anti-semitic left is said to be not its criticism of Israel, but the severity of its criticism, and in particular its anti-Zionism, “its refusal to recognize Israel” and concomitant denial to Jews of the rights allegedly granted to others. In other words, left opposition to Israel is deemed anti-semitic to the extent that it diverges from what the pro-Israel camp defines as proportionate or acceptable criticism.

That in some quarters anti-semitism functions as the anti-imperialism of fools, especially in the Arab world, is undeniable. But conversely, there is a putative anti-anti-semitism in the West that functions as a camouflage for Israel.

Unrepresentative Jewish establishment

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has for more than a century enjoyed an unrivaled status as a representative of Jews in Britain (its US counterparts compete among themselves). During that time it has opposed Jewish participation in every broad anti-racist movement, from Cable Street in the thirties through the Anti-Nazi League of the mid-1970s to the GLC’s anti-racist programs in the 1980s and the campaign for immigrants’ rights today. In 2005, the Board joined the Chief Rabbi in condemning the democratic, lengthily debated decision of the Synod of the Church of England to withdraw its £2.5 million investment in Caterpillar, the US-based corporation that manufactures bulldozers used by Israeli forces to demolish Palestinian homes and farms. “The timing could not have been more inappropriate,” the Chief Rabbi complained, just when Israel found itself “facing two enemies, Iran and Hamas.” The Caterpillar disinvestment, Sacks threatened, would have “the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish–Christian relations in Britain.” The Church panicked and rescinded the decision.

For the most part the British media treat the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies as the authentic (and exclusive) representatives of Jews in Britain, despite the fact that neither is elected by or accountable to the Jewish community as a whole. The Chief Rabbi heads the Orthodox Synagogues, to which a minority of Jews are affiliated. He can make no claims on behalf of Reform, Masorti, Chasidic, Sephardic, Liberal, independent Orthodox or non-synagogue-affiliated Jews. Similarly, the Board of Deputies consists of representatives of a variety of Jewish bodies (synagogues, youth groups, charities, etcetera). It’s not inclusive nor is it accountable to the wider community in whose name it speaks.

The blame for the misidentification of Jews as a whole with Israel lies principally with the Jewish establishment, with the Zionists, with the Israeli spokespersons who justify every lawless, brutal act as a necessary part of the battle for Jewish survival. And with all those who’ve installed the cult of Israel at the centre of Judaism and Jewishness.

Anti-Arab racism

Let’s compare, for a moment, the presence of anti-semitism within the Palestinian or anti-war movements to the presence of other forms of racism (anti-Arab, anti-Muslim) within the opposing camp. In both the US and Britain, support for Israel (not to mention the Iraq and Afghanistan wars) is frequently accompanied by open ethnic hostility. Nor is this confined to an extremist fringe. In fact, it is a racism more legitimized by, more prominent within, more typical of their politics than the stupidities mentioned above are of ours. Racism arises from the premises of Zionism, whereas rejection of racism is at the heart of anti-Zionism. Compared to the deformations of anti-Zionism or Palestinian solidarity by anti-semitism, the essential formation of Zionism by racism (anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, white-supremacist) is commonplace and frequently undisguised. Where anti-semitism can be and is being challenged within the framework of anti-Zionism and of the democratic anti-racist left, anti-Arab racism is entirely compatible with and largely unchallenged within the Zionist milieu.

The same Jewish leaders who are quick to spot and denounce any hint of anti-semitism among critics of Israel have nothing critical to say about Israeli politicians who compare Palestinians to insects or rodents or dub all Israeli Arabs “fifth columnists.” They say nothing about the calls for ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land (transfer) that are visible on posters from one end of the Jewish state to the other. This institutional, state-empowered, life-destroying racism is ignored, while the wrong-headed but essentially impotent anti-semitism of Palestinians who express their outrage at the “yehudi” is wrenched out of context and offered up as an excuse for Israeli violence.

Given the wanton, persistent and cynical abuse of the anti-semitism charge—something nearly everyone active in Palestinian solidarity experiences at one time or another—it’s not surprising that people are wary of the boy crying wolf. But remember the story. Because the boy falsely and repeatedly cried wolf, when a real wolf actually turned up one grisly night, no one believed him. And the boy was eaten by the wolf.

• If I Am Not For Myself is published by Verso Books. Available at a discounted price here…
• A new book by Mike Marqusee, Definable Traces in the Atmosphere, was published posthumously in July 2018 by OR Books and is availabel here…

Tribute to Mike Marqusee: The life and work of infectious activist and inspiring writer. By Jeremy Corbyn…

Source: Red Pepper

Author Mike Marqusee, who died 13 January 2015, published Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art in 2003. The book recalls Dylan’s ‘protest song’ years, when he wrote some of the most enduring anthems for the social justice and anti-war movements.

The song is founded on a conviction that the movement for social change is unstoppable, that history will conform to morality. In its second verse, Dylan issues a brash, enduring challenge to the punditocracy: “Come writers and critics/ Who prophesize with your pen/ And keep your eyes wide/ The chance won’t come again/ And don’t speak too soon/ For the wheel’s still in spin.”

It was the unexpected achievements of the civil rights movement, a grass-roots upsurge which transformed the American political landscape, that made this challenge and the song as a whole possible and even plausible. But it was Dylan’s genius to articulate the universal spirit animating the specific historical moment.

The protest songs that made Dylan famous and with which he continues to be associated were written in a brief period of some 20 months – from January 1962 to November 1963. Influenced by American radical traditions (the Wobblies, the Popular Front of the thirties and forties, the Beat anarchists of the fifties) and above all by the political ferment touched off among young people by the civil rights and ban the bomb movements, he engaged in his songs with the terror of the nuclear arms race, with poverty, racism and prison, jingoism and war. He also penned love songs that mingled delicate regret with brutal candour (“we never did much talkin’ anyway”).

This creative firestorm gave us ‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps’, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ (class rule as the root of racism), ‘With God on Our Side’ (rejecting American fundamentalism), ‘Masters of War’ (taking on the military-industrial complex), the gleefully vindictive ‘When the Ship Comes In’ and the magnificent ‘Hattie Carroll’, a clear-eyed account of a single injustice that becomes an indictment of a system and its liberal defenders.

Thanks to his sharp-edged radicalism and unique poetic gifts (as well as no little musical craft) Dylan renewed the protest genre and helped it reach a new mass audience. When The Times They Are A-Changin’ album came out in January 1964, the 22 year old from Minnesota found himself crowned as the laureate of a social movement, hailed as “the voice of a generation”.

In the meantime, however, Dylan had decided that this was not what he wanted to be. The new Woody Guthrie was mutating into something else – something that made some of his early acolytes uncomfortable. For Dylan is not only the most renowned protest singer of his era but also its most renowned renegade. In mid-1964, he explained to critic Nat Hentoff: “Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore – you know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me …I’m not part of no movement… I just can’t make it with any organisation…”

He was in the midst of recording a song called ‘My Back Pages’, a dense, image-crammed critique of the movement he had celebrated in ‘The Times They are A-Changin”. Here he sneers at “corpse evangelists” who use “ideas” as “maps”, who spout “lies that life is black and white” and who fail to understand that “I become my enemy in the instant that I preach.” Alarmed by the discovery of authoritarianism at the heart of the movement for liberation (and within himself), he rebels against the left’s self-righteousness. He pours bile on the “self-ordained professor/ Too serious to fool”. He scorns what he sees as the dead culture of political activism: “memorising politics/ Of ancient history”.

‘Equality, I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow
But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’

This refrain – a recantation in every sense of the word – must be one of the most lyrical expressions of political apostasy ever penned. Ex-radicals usually ascribe their evolution to the inevitable giving-way of rebellious youth to responsible maturity. Dylan reversed the polarity. For him, the retreat from politics was a retreat from stale categories and second-hand attitudes. The refrain encapsulates the movement from the pretence of knowing it all to the confession of knowing nothing.

But in its assertion of youth’s autonomy, ‘My Back Pages’ doesn’t so much repudiate ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” as deepen and extend it. He was urging the young people of the sixties to reject categories inherited from the past and define their own terms. For Dylan, youth itself – that vast new social demographic – had become the touchstone of authenticity. A tremendously empowering notion for the generation whom it first infected, but also, as it turned out, a cul-de-sac, and less of a revolutionary posture than it seemed at the time.

Dylan’s break with politics and the movement that had been his first inspiration unleashed his poetic and musical genius; it freed him to explore an inner landscape. His lyrics became more obscure; coherent narrative was jettisoned in favour of carnivalesque surrealism; the austerity of the acoustic folk troubadour was replaced by the hedonistic extravagance of an electrified rock n roll ensemble. The songs depicted a private universe – but one forged in response to tumultuous public events.

It’s remarkable that so many of Dylan’s left critics failed to see the politics that infuse his masterworks of the mid-sixties. ‘Maggie’s Farm’ – booed by purists at the Newport folk festival – fuses class and generational rage in an uncompromising renunciation of wage labour. Here the power of the employers is propped up by ideology (“She talks to all the servants about man and God and law”) and the state (“the National Guard stands around her door”.) The social order is experienced as intrusive, deceitful, inimical to the individual’s need for self-definition. “I try my best to be just like I am/ but everybody wants you to be just like them.”

These themes were also explored in ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’, Dylan’s epic indictment of a society built on hypocrisy and greed (“money doesn’t talk it swears”). Here consciousness is the battleground; it’s where the individual struggles to extract some autonomy from the all-pervading corruption of a society ruled by commodities.

If my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine

Although Dylan never dealt explicitly with Vietnam, its escalating madness can be felt in two of the major compositions he recorded in mid-1965, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Tombstone Blues’. In the latter, Dylan portrays “the Commander-in-Chief” (it was Lyndon Johnson, but might as well be George Bush) proclaiming:

“Death to all those who would whimper and cry!”
And dropping a barbell he points to the sky
Saying, “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken”

In these and other songs of the period, Dylan recoils with horror (and wit) from a public world poisoned by militarist patriotism and commercial hucksterism. Far from having jettisoned politics, Dylan was redefining its scope. In compositions like ‘Visions of Johanna’ or ‘Desolation Row’, great social themes jostle with intimate grievances. When a disappointed punter at the Albert Hall called out for “protest songs”, a frustrated Dylan replied: “Oh come on, these are all protest songs.”

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” Dylan wrote in 1966. This prophetic warning – to a generation, a movement, himself – leaps out of ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, a silly, swaggering song of sexual frustration. The next line is less well known, but telling: “And I know you always say that you agree.”

For today’s anti-war and global justice movements, Dylan’s songs of the sixties offer both a bracing protest against enduring enemies and a salutary critique of some of our own worst habits.