The Peace Process

The debate about anitsemitism on the Left has descended into a murky fog of war, familiar to anyone who has had to argue about racism, in which everyone is second-guessing every sentence’s true meaning, teasing out the implications of phrasing, attempting to grapple with the vast historical grotesque that is Jew-hate and wrestle it down into a soundbite that proves the others wrong. Nothing, in such a noxious brawl, will be achieved.

Cutting to the heart of the matter, this recurring problem has very little to do with how the Left thinks racially: I don’t think Livingstone actually dislikes Jews. We must take people at their word that this is about Palestine. Until the ghosts of the Cold War and the decolonisation period are effectively dealt with, this row will simply come back over and over again, a knife in the side of the centre-left that can be twisted whenever any antagonist wishes to do so. Let us lay it out this way:

• The Left sides with the Palestinian cause because it fits in with a number of anticolonial struggles of the past, the parallels with South Africa being most obvious
• The socialist Left has made common cause with Arab nationalism (which has occasionally also been socialist), Pan-Islamic nationalism and more worryingly Islamism in opposing Israeli policy
• Arab nationalism has never really left antisemitism behind since the days of Amin al-Husseini, and both of the other two lean on old antisemitic tropes to a massive degree
• The two bleed into each other very easily in situations like Malia Bouattia or Naz Shah precisely because it is where socialist and Pan-Islamist philosophies meet

The problem then is that too few people involved in UK leftism are capable of watching that boundary close enough. They are aware of the Israeli nationalist use of anti-Semite as a slur against them and so never seem to take action until things are too late out of pride. This latest episode may yet go some way to improving the reaction speeds in future, but until the above four points are all widely acknowledged, I think the problem will simply return with the next set of anti-Israel comments.

Once the problem is admitted, we’ll have to come up with a way of solving it: of ensuring that Arab antisemitism can never again be confused with liberal criticism of Israel, whether out of convenience or deception. What we need then, is a solid dividing line, a line that the conspiracist Islamists will not cross. I think I know what that line will be, and I doubt that many on the Left will like it.

We must make peace with Zionism. No longer can we describe ourselves as anti-Zionist as if that makes us better than anti-Semites. The right for the self-determination of the Jewish people in Palestine must at last be uncoupled from criticism of colonialism. Every criticism of Israel must become prefaced with a reminder that we want a liberal socialist Israel providing security for its citizens as many liberal Zionists would themselves argue for.

The modesty of the essential Zionist claim, that those Jews living in their ancestral homeland should have a state in which they are a majority large enough to ensure their own protection, can no longer be questioned by liberal people in the West. Rather we must view with suspicion those who use “Zionist” as a pejorative. Only by forcing that dividing line will we see where the NUS truly stands, since if they believe that in 1947 the Jewish population of Palestine would have been better served under the rule of an Arab government in Jordan or worse, one led by Husseini himself, then they are not serious about protecting Jewish people. If not, then they are Zionists.

This wrenching change for the Left, who have found worldwide solidarity by treating Zionism as an offshoot of the colonialism they defeated in the last century, will peel many from its ranks. But there is no other way to convince Israelis and Jews that despite criticism, we care for them. Only by allaying the understandable suspicion by Jews of those who would ally with their tormenters can we avoid having to answer these inquisitions in future. If we do not, Jews won’t care what we say we meant – they’ll have heard us loud and clear.