Weaponising Anti-Semitism - A review
Electronic Intifada's Asa Winstanley wrote a 300 page portrayal of the UK Labour Party as being under the thumb of the Israel lobby.
As part of the mission of JAFFA, I will be doing critical readings and reviews of notable literature that is anti-Israel, anti-Jewish or anti-Zionist in order to understand the motivations and ideas behind them and formulate logical rebuttals to them. Today I am doing it for Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn, by Asa Winstanley. I encourage you to comment if you have read this book and have your own impressions.
Almost five years ago when the UK Labour Party was routed in the UK general election, achieving its worst result since 1935, the drama in media was much more focused on the fate of its leader Jeremy Corbyn than on the triumphant winner Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. Many pointed the finger at Corbyn for being the Achilles heel of his party, and as expected he resigned as party leader pending the election of a replacement after having lost two election contests, leading to the rise of his successor and ideological foe Sir Keir Starmer.
But the story doesn’t end there. Since then Corbyn was suspended from the party in 2020, reinstated shortly thereafter, and excluded from Labour’s parliamentary caucus. it is ironic that I am writing this review soon after Corbyn was formally expelled from Labour after announcing an independent run for re-election to his Islington North parliamentary seat. Due to unprecedented voter apathy among Conservatives, Starmer is more than likely the next British prime minister pending a general election on July 4, a fact that will undoubtedly enrage Corbyn’s die-hard supporters. One of those who is more rigid in his positions on both socialism in Britain and the foreign policy areas that concerned Corbyn is Asa Winstanley, a writer for Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada website, who wrote Weaponising Anti-Semitism. The book is an answer to those who accused the former leader of being a Jew hater, but also criticizes him for not defending himself and other Labour activists from accusations and disciplinary actions on that front. Winstanley, a pro-Palestine activist for the International Solidarity Movement during the 2000s, writes in a voice that should be familiar to anyone watching the current day protests and riots on college campuses relating to the war in Gaza.
According to Winstanley it was Corbyn’s weakness against attacks by Zionist elements within his party that doomed him, focusing specifically on two Labour subgroups, Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). They were aghast at Corbyn’s pro-Palestinian record of speech and activism and therefore, along with the Israeli embassy and government as alleged in the book, they were willing to resort to any and all tactics to torpedo Corbyn’s chances of political success getting further than being Leader of the Opposition. As such the Zionists resorted to a most underhanded tactic in order to subvert the voices of Corbyn or any other Israel critic - the use of exaggerated or fabricated incidents of Jew hatred or Israel criticism in order to create an artificial crisis in the party, hence the title “Weaponising Anti-Semitism”. The book goes into excruciating and exhausting detail regarding a number of these episodes: the investigation of the Oxford University Labour Club activists Max Shanly and James Elliott over alleged anti-Jewish remarks, a dossier leaked to the media alleging rampant anti-Semitism in Liverpool’s Riverside Constituency Labour Party, and the suspensions/expulsions of a number of notable anti-Zionist Labour supporters such as the black socialists Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London.
One issue that is mentioned in passing but not clarified totally is what is “anti-Semitism” and how does one draw the line between criticism of individuals or entities that are Jewish or Zionist and criticism of them because they are Jewish? As he is a writer for Electronic Intifada, the author tends to see any connection drawn between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism as being a dishonest smear meant to stifle advocacy for the Palestinian people. I myself have been critical of Jewish institutions here in the United States like the ADL using accusations of anti-Semitism as the basis for censorship, so of course even while disagreeing with the ideology of the author and his crowd, I can understand the free speech implications of using accusations of bigotry in order to limit criticism.
This is the lone common ground I can find with the author. Throughout the book Winstanley lays out that he has a position on Zionism that is just as extreme if not more than what he levels at Britain’s pro-Israel movement. Anti-Zionists like to distinguish themselves from anti-Semites by opposing Israel and its supporters while saying that Jews as such are not the problem. However, this does not mean that they do not build similar intolerant attitudes that present themselves by conflating people’s behaviours that are benign or neutral with “Zionism” and then attack them in the same way anti-Semites see “Jews” everywhere. Accordingly here are such examples that I saw in Weaponising Anti-Semitism.
No, you’re the entryists!
In one passage (p. 24) Winstanley addresses the issue of the pro-Corbyn movement Labour Momentum being accused of “entryism” which is when a small radical organization joins a larger one in order to take it over from the inside. In choosing an example of real entryism he overlooked the most obvious one, the Militant tendency, a group of Trotskyist extremists who wreaked havoc in Labour during the 1980s and helped doom it electorally during the Thatcher era. Instead he chose the Alliance for Workers Liberty, an obscure organization that is largely unheard of outside of left-wing intellectual circles. Winstanley goes so far as to call the AWL “a bizarrely pro-Israel Trotskyite cult”.
This personal anecdote of bewilderment at the prejudiced views of PSC activists from a former comrade of theirs earns him Winstanley’s condemnation as a “Zionist”, not because he is one but rather because it’s the worst thing he can call him.
But AWL if anything is deeply critical of Israel; it’s only sin is that it supports the two-state solution and therefore is not in favour of dissolving or destroying Israel in order to create a new Palestinian state. In fact AWL had disbanded as a party and joined Labour in 2015 in order to support Jeremy Corbyn. Why would a pro-Israel group join the Labour Party in order to bolster an anti-Israel candidate?! The AWL was later banned from being associated with Labour under Starmer in 2022. These two facts are omitted by Winstanley, who mentions the AWL one further time (p. 290-291) in order to denounce the post-Corbyn party for hiring Patrick Smith as part of its disputes team because of his past membership in the AWL, which here he describes as “Zionist”. But, as is also omitted, Smith had left the AWL because he saw its leaders as Islamophobic based on some pronouncements of its leader Sean Matgamna. Smith’s disparaging comments about the Palestine Solidarity Campaign are apparently what drew Winstanley’s ire, but he does not explain them in the book, which is a criticism he often levels at the leaders of the “witch hunt” within Labour against Palestinian activists. In the article Winstanley cited from the communist Weekly Worker newsletter, Patrick Smith recounted to the interviewer that he met a PSC member who once declared “The Jews [of Israel] should go back to Brooklyn”. This personal anecdote of bewilderment at the prejudiced views of PSC activists from a former comrade of theirs earns him Winstanley’s condemnation as a “Zionist”, not because he is one but rather because it’s the worst thing he can call him.
The Jewish Labour legitimacy battle
Winstanley is not wrong in diagnosing the hostility toward Corbyn of the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, and it is understandable why expressed bewilderment that Corbyn even attempted to reach out by attending their events. Much of the book focuses on the work of JLM and LFI activists and members of Parliament and their interactions with personnel at the Israeli embassy, as well as the formation of a Corbynista rival group, Jewish Voice for Labour. However, as with the previous example, he narrows the framing of the topic of these three organizations to suit his deeply anti-Israel viewpoints. Hence he fails to point out that LFI politicians like Wes Streeting MP paradoxically are often also members of the Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East at the same time. Has Winstanley ever entertained the notion that these politicians are playing politics by pandering to both sides?
As for JLM he does go into the organization’s long history as the Poalei Zion movement prior to 2004, and castigates Labour for at one time being complicit in what he sees as the crime of enabling the colonialist project of the Zionist Yishuv in the British Mandate of Palestine between 1917 and 1948. Winstanley's focus on the Jewish Labour Movement, just like his attack against the AWL, is rooted in the schismatic politics of left-wing circles where oftentimes movements split over ideological fault lines. It also ironically validates the allegation that many Corbynistas were practicing entryism and attempting not to restore the Labour Party - as they insist - from its corrupt state under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but rather replace it by devouring it from within.
As its name suggests the Labour Party emerged out of the trade union movements of the 1800s and began to gain popularity and eventually real political power during and after WWI. However, it had an ambivalent and sometimes hostile relationship with outright communist parties both in Britain and abroad. The excesses of the Bolshevik Revolution had soured the British public on the idea of radical change, and Labour desired to win power electorally rather than by force. Similarly, Labour Zionism was focused on organizing Jewish workers in Mandatory Palestine, often through collectives and the powerful Histadrut trade union, to build the Jewish homeland through socialist projects like the kibbutz (collective farm) and co-operative enterprises like its bus companies Egged and Dan. For this reason the "Old Left", which was primarily class and trade focused, often included many Zionists and sympathizers. In fact, prior to the Tory Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour's declaration in 1917 of the UK adopting it as official policy to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the recently seized region of Palestine, the Labour Party did so through its War Aims Memorandum. As Israel was a new country building a welfare state, its ruling party Mapai shared much in common with Labour and under its Prime Minister Harold Wilson Israeli-British relations became closer than ever.
Attitudes on the British left began to shift negatively against Israel and Zionism in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War and the rise of Palestinian militant groups which coincided with Third World liberation movements around the world and the rise of the New Left. Within the activist scene of the Labour Party this shift had increasing importance, including for younger members like Jeremy Corbyn who joined in 1965 when he was 16 years old. In the 1980s while in opposition Labour was convulsed by the issue of radical entryism, with the moderate leadership eventually prevailing but the party as a whole suffering from consecutive electoral defeats until Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
Jewish Voice for Labour, formed in 2017, was made up of Corbynista Jews supporting the new path charted by him as a restoration of Labour’s socialist platform abandoned under Blair. JVL’s reason for existence was its objection to JLM’s pro-Israel position being assumed to represent all Jews in the Labour Party, and Winstanley at one point insists that JVL as a group is not explicitly anti-Zionist. Yet all of the important figures of the movement are, especially the Israeli-British writer and mathematician Moshe Machover, a co-founder of the Israeli anti-Zionist group Matzpen. Machover was booted from Labour temporarily in 2017 for being associated with a faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which would make him an entryist, but he was reinstated. The entire issue boils down to the fact that the majority of British Jews, even Labour Party supporters, do support Israel and found Corbyn to be anti-Semitic. Those that did not flocked to Corbyn, but represent a statistically insignificant vote share.
Who broke Corbyn?
The premise of the entire book was that the weaponized anti-Semitism crisis is what frustrated Corbyn’s time as Labour leader and eventually led to his downfall in the 2019 general election. However, at one point even Winstanley had to obliquely concede that even he does not totally believe this. Still, he never admits that it was Corbyn’s dithering policy on Brexit, the UK’s exit from the European Union, that left Labour battered in 2019. This, and not the anti-Semitism allegations, was at the top of mind for most of Labour’s traditional working class voters and his refusal to formulate a coherent policy helped lead to the loss of seats like Bolsover, occupied by MP Dennis Skinner for Labour since 1970, to the Tories. It would be foolish to think otherwise, but that is exactly the mentality of the author, and he is not alone. As evidenced by recent demonstrations throughout the UK and in London in particular, significant numbers of British citizens are more concerned with events in the Middle East than they are in the sluggish state of their own economy, illegal immigration, and the horrid state of the National Health Service.