No it isn't. If I criticise the Chinese government it doesn't make me anti-Chinese.
Weak from Starmer particularly when he handed Rachel 'Lady Astor is awesome' Reeves a job.
Gonna have to explain this to you, like I've had to explain this to so many other fellow people on the left. I've had years and years of this kind of blindness and I'm just fed up of it, and I'm not even Jewish.
Here's the thing: Israel isn't responsible for killing George Floyd. Now, I know what you're going to say - but they trained American cops! Or maybe it'll be that Israelis have used chokeholds and kneeling on necks to victimise Palestinians, just like American cops do.
That's completely missing the point.
Of course, there's a long history of exchange between American and Israeli cops and troops. Conferences, training exercises, intelligence sharing, political alliances... it's all there. But I know exactly why Maxine Peake said what she said. She's seen some of the same articles going around that I have that take the real facts of the matter - that Israeli and American cops have run training courses for each other - and extrapolated a more direct line between that and the specific death of George Floyd and other black Americans, to the extent of a causal link.
American cops do not need to be taught how to victimise, beat, and murder black people. They've been doing it fine for centuries (including using chokeholds and/or their knees), and, yes, they've exported that knowledge around the world and imported new stuff in turn and, yes, it forms part of the overall process by which America and the West in general maintains and preserves its hegemony. There are plenty of secret police services in countries with friendly "presidents" who can thank the West for their training. But what happens again and again and again on the left is that critiquing this system slips from from the broader perspective of it as a constellation of different countries and armies and police forces, and instead, when it becomes specific, it becomes (explicitly or, as in this case, implicitly) "...because Israel".
Israel, Israel, Israel. Now, look. I live in London, and, believe it or not, I have a lot of Jewish friends and acquaintances - and most of them have no time for the idea that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semite. The idea is ludicrous. He has a unmatched record among politicians in this country of actually being an anti-racist, as opposed to just talking about racism being bad while slinging asylum seekers in prison or shipping the Windrush generation back "home". He has voted and marched and protested and argued against legislation that has and still makes life shit for people who aren't the right colour, here and internationally. But his massive, massive fucking blind spot was always that he and his Stop The War crowd could never understand that always dropping Israel into the centre of whichever system you're critiquing is a big red flag to Jewish people. I probably know half the anti-Zionist Jews in the UK, and the ones that voted for Corbyn - most of them as socialist as him - still had to hold their noses when they did. And they all talk about how casually anti-Israeli jokes and comments are made in left-wing circles, how often there's this casual anti-semitic trope of making out Israel to be this exceptional evil, this exceptional monster in all this. Israel is a cog in the machine,
but it is not the machine.
The first time I encountered this was during a student occupation at uni - we were trying to get them to disinvest from the arms trade, so we took over a lecture theatre, put up banners about how many millions the uni had in shares in companies making weapons that were being used to kill poor people around the world, and we handed out flyers and talked to people who came along about how their tuition fees were directly funding this stuff. So far, so standard. But when we sat down on the second day to draw up a specific list of demands for when we went into negotiations with the university officials, very quickly I noticed that the general demands about arms trading and the use of them in lots of different conflicts around the world... became all about Israel using them on Palestinians. There was a Starbucks cafe that had just opened in the library, and somebody proposed that we added kicking Starbucks off campus "because they support the IDF". Very soon this general occupation became all about BDS - which I support, for the record, but not at the expense of everything else. The Jewish Society raised concerns because of how things became so Israel-focused. My Jewish friends started avoiding me on campus. Nobody ever said "fuck the Jews". It wasn't like a lot of right-wing anti-semitism, which usually (but not always) takes a more straightforward form of ethnic discrimination and stereotyping. But it took time for me to convince people that, no, I really wasn't comfortable with this shit either, and eventually I had to leave the group because it became too much of a focus. Not to mention that the whole thing devolved into - of course - a widespread campus debate about anti-semitism, rather than about the arms trade.
Maxine Peake and RLB know they fucked up, and know that what they did was propagate an anti-semitic conspiracy theory that's been going around the left-wing media ecosystem for the last few weeks, and that's why they apologised so quickly. But the point here is that lots of people on the left just don't have the antenna for this stuff, and, worse, it's completely hypocritical and lacking in empathy to resort to "well, can we not criticise Israel now?!?" It's such weak sauce. Don't do it. It serves no purpose other than to make normal people, who aren't involved in political activism or electoral political activity, think that you're only of a bunch of nutters talking about Jews and Israel. It has no rhetorical value, it does nothing to change the terms of debate in your favour, and it just perpetuates the whole damned cycle.
Although, that does bring me to a bigger point here, which is addressed at a lot of other people on this thread. I get it. Labour's spent five years being "an anti-semitic party". I want to just say this: Question why you think that. Because the truth of this is also that Starmer was absolutely looking to get rid of RLB at the first chance, and there was nothing about this that was sincerely about "fighting anti-semitism". This was about the BBC News alert banner on peoples' phones, and words like "decisive" and "clear action". To bring this back to my own anecdotal evidence here from my Jewish anti-Zionist friends - they're so, so, so tired and sick and upset about being used as a political football. The truth is that the UK is an institutionally racist country, and that one of the few politicians to actually recognise that and not just pay lip service to the things that need to be done to fix it was blasted on all sides by the political and cultural elite because he threatened their status quo of influence, and controlling the limits of national debate.
Corbyn would have published what the British did to people of colour in the global south, as recorded in documents suppressed since decolonisation. He would have returned Diego Garcia to its people, who were kicked out to make way for a British and American army base. He would have shut down pervasive surveillance of personal communications. He would have instituted actual reforms of state violence through the police and army. He would have changed the school curriculum to include the actual history of what the UK has done to the rest of the world. And that's just talking about the social side of things, rather than economic, like the green new deal etc etc. But pay attention to what happens in the press, and how things like "Keir Starmer takes decisive action against RLB" are framed. Corbyn spent years bending over backwards to include people not from his wing of the party, and he was still called authoritarian (lol). People used words like "purge" and "factionalism". Starmer wipes out whole wings of people he doesn't agree with and it's "decisive", "non-factional", according to people like Hodge. The old crowd are back in charge, and they're going to make sure you know that they're the good and proper people for it. There's no political value in getting rid of right-wing anti-semites in the party like Reeves, just like both Labour and Tories are riddled with all kinds of other racists (particularly anti-Muslim and anti-black) because there's nothing to be won from doing so in terms of votes in an election. That was always the flip-side of Corbyn's blind-spot on anti-semitism: he always wanted to talk about "all forms of racism", and he is a committed anti-racist regardless of its electoral relevance. And by being so stubborn, and so unwilling to consider that maybe casual anti-Zionism was both a problem in terms of veering into anti-semitism
and that it made him - a lifelong anti-racist and campaigner for civil liberties and human rights - easy to portray as an aggressive, authoritarian, dangerous racist who wanted to put people in the gulags like Stalin. It's insane, but that's how basic and low-level you've got to fight in electoral politics, and Corbyn never fucking got that into his head. And, irony of irony, the new leader who does understand it is one of the most acclaimed and respected human rights campaigners and lawyers in recent British history.
And above all, something has been perfected: the use of anti-semitism to keep the left in check, because the left
cannot deny racism like the right. The Conservatives have measurably done actually racist things in terms of policy, and many of them have also said or expressed actually racist things, personally. Yet for millions of people, Corbyn was the racist. And that's because too many on the left cannot understand that
we do not get to dictate the rules of the game we are playing. This is the game. This is what we have to deal with. And, again, complain about "not being able to criticise Israel" as much as you want. You're just scoring own goal after own goal until we can materially change the public's understanding of what racism is, and we can find a way to get around the fact that the media in this country only cares about racism when it's anti-semitism. And until then, Jewish people are still going to be sick and anxious and upset about being in the middle of all this.
