Antisemitism Again

There are a number of reasons for the Labour Party's continuing troubles over antisemitism. Having deployed it as a weapon for factional ends, there should be no surprise that it has proven to be a double-edged sword in the hands of the Tory press who, for commercial as much as ideological reasons, like nothing better than blood on the floor. Likewise, the patent insincerity of the more thuggish elements of the Labour right in claiming to be lifelong campaigners against racism and bigotry was always likely to blow up in their faces at some point. I'm genuinely surprised it has taken this long, but that in turn points to a third reason: that the media's indulgence of Keir Starmer's leadership was always likely to end ahead of the next general election. He lacks the charisma and novelty of a mid-90s Blair and the process of making Labour's manifesto "bullet-proof" against Tory attacks has left a vacuum that needs to be filled somewhow. When your leading defenders are either insisting that you are a serial dissembler who will suprise us all by being more radical in office, or that your lack of fixed principles is actually a sign of pragmatic maturity, then you know you're going to struggle when the electorate asks what it's getting in return for booting out the Conservatives.

Beyond the confines of the Labour Party, the contemporary salience of antisemitism obviously owes a lot to the conflict in Gaza, though it should be emphasised that the turn in sympathy against Israel and towards the Palestinians, which is what we're really talking about here, long-predated the 7th of October and can be traced back to the collapse of the Oslo accords. The defenders of Israeli policy, such as the UK's Community Security Trust, whose data on the level of "antisemitic incidents" is routinely relayed by the media without interrogation, have obviously sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, to the point of now claiming that the phrase "Free Palestine" is anti-Jewish if addressed towards Jews or Jewish institutions. In other words, we are seeing the boundary of what qualifies as antisemitism expanded, a danger that many previously predicted in respect of the demand to adopt the IHRA definition without qualification, including Kenneth Stern. This rhetorical inflation has led to many tropes that were previously considered acceptable, if crude and insulting, to now be taken as prima facie evidence of antisemitic intent, which appears to be what has tripped up Azhar Ali and Graham Jones, the two prospective parliamentary candidates at the centre of the latest Labour "row".

There is a fine line between believing that Israel has opportunistically exploited the 7/10 attack to pursue long-standing aims in Gaza and believing that there was a conspiracy to amplify the attack in order to further those aims. In suggesting the latter, Azhar Ali was indulging his audience in a worldview assumed to be common among Muslims: not just that Israel is conniving but that it is cruel and callous. What this suggests is that the presumption of factions based on ethnic or religious heritage remains part of Labour's internal management culture. Party members, even relatively elevated ones such as councillors, are assumed to have bloc loyalties (specifically to Pakistani-heritage biraderi) and must therefore be appealed to by pandering to what are assumed to be that bloc's prejudices. The two leading theories as to who leaked the meeting are that it was either a member of another faction disappointed by Ali's selection or someone genuinely appalled by what he said. In either case, this was clearly a political decision, which indicates how misguided it was to try and address the participant's concerns through the medium of an imagined bloc identity.

In contrast to Ali's statements, Graham Jones's "Fucking Israel" is a nationalist rather than a communalist sentiment. Likewise the claim that anyone fighting for the IDF is a traitor. What this highights is the double nature of antisemitism, here in the form of two distinct traditions: the idea of Jews as insufficiently loyal to their "adopted" country (Jones) and the idea of Jews as having an intrinsic moral deficit wherever they are found (Ali). The former has tended to be characterised as a sophisticated, even aristocratic tradition (e.g. the Dreyfus Affair), while the latter has been seen as vulgar: the antisemitism of the marketplace (e.g. Kristallnacht). But in reality these two traditions have always overlapped to the point where there is no meaningful distinction in practice - i.e. in how they impact on Jews. It exists purely in the minds of antisemites. The distinction between an upper class patriotism and a lower class materialism was constructed to reflect better on that upper class and to quarantine the lower classes whose "excitable" responses to economic disruption had a tendency to expand beyond questions of Jewish culpability into broader debates about inequality and power.

The paradox of Nazi antisemitism - that the Jews could be characterised as both rich and powerful and at the same time as poor and verminous - was not simply a geographical distinction between the assimilated Jews of the Rhineland and the alien Jews of the Polish shtetls. It was also a class distinction in motive: the bourgeois antisemite resented the unequal competition of the bourgeois Jewish cabal and despised the vulgarity of the poor Jew, while the working class antsemite resented the power of the Jewish capitalist and despised the unequal competition of the Jewish worker willing to accept lower wages. The double nature of antisemitism reflects those class differences. Likewise, just as anti-black racism reflects the beliefs of "white" racists rather than any intrinsic quality of "blacks" (hence racism birthed race, not the other way round), so classic antisemitism - that is the antisemitism of the modern historial era rather than the religious antisemitism of the pre-modern era - reflects the ideology of the ethnically homogeneous nation, which was meant to unify the classes. 

That classic antisemitism, with its roots in the nineteenth century and its overlaps with "scientific racism", never went away because we never superseded the nation state. But it has altered over time, specifically the dual nature of antisemitism has seen a bifurcation. The vulgar Jew has retreated into history in most Western societies. This is not simply because of the demographic impact of the Holocaust in Europe or the successful upward social mobility of Jews in the US (incidentally a continuing theme in American culture, e.g. in recent films such as Oppenheimer and Maestro). There are still working class Jews, but you rarely see them in the media. Instead the community representatives are overwhelmingly middle or upper-middle-class, tend towards the centre-right politically, and identify with the establishment. Likewise, few of us are familiar with the reality of working class life in Israel because Western media prefer to present the country in middle-class terms as one of technology start-ups, liberal values (that admittedly need defending from the vulgar Netanyahu) and the IDF's gender-equality, with the charedim as little more than a background noise and the illiberal settler movement as semi-detached.

This has left a vacancy that has been filled by Islamophobia. The traditional tropes of antisemitism from the "lower" tradition have been transferred wholesale: the shadowy conspiracies and unfair competition (the underlying rumble about the Rochdale selection), the morbid religiosity, the desire to defile white women ("grooming" will be on the Rochdale ballot courtesy of an independent candidate). We can also see elements of the upper tradition echoed in popular forms - e.g. the treatment of the traitorous Shamima Begum. But if the upper tradition lives on, it does so predominantly, if paradoxically, under cover of philosemitism. The Jews are to be applauded because they have shown us what a true nation state looks like. They are defeating the Muslim interlopers, purging their land and ensuring the survival of the Jewish race. A good example of how these two traditions now combine was offered this week by Trevor Kavanagh, the former Political Editor of The Sun, who opined that all Muslims are by definition anti-Jewish. This manages to treat both Muslims and Jews as homogeneous groups with common characteristics, while also conflating all Jews with Israel.

What this suggests is that Labour isn't going to able to "rid itself" of antisemitism, or at least the appearance of it, any time soon. The Tories will insist on the association of Muslim support and antisemitism not simply as a way of attracting Jewish (and Indian) support to themselves but as a way of gradually detaching Muslim voters from Labour. The hierarchy of racism within the party reflects a factional approach, and that won't change so long as the party remains averse to actual politics and so preserves the utility of ethnic blocs. The groups that achieved national prominence campaigning against antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn, such as the JLM, are unlikely to cede that prominence now, which will encourage further rhetorical inflation. The identification of the left with antisemitism has been pursued to inoculate the party from any taint of socialism, but the consequence of this has not just been a shift to the right on the ideological spectrum but a movement in the boundary of antisemitism itself, as Azhar Ali and Graham Jones have just discovered. Too many people are now invested in the persistence of antisemitism within Labour for it to easily disappear.