Category: Jewish Question
State Collusion: Jewish Extremist Escapes Trial for Religious Assault on Galloway
From the Jewish Chronicle: – which appears to be the only paper to have covered this. Will the left media make an issue of it, I wonder? Don’t hold your breath!
It appears that Neil Masterson, who admits this disgusting, violent attack on free speech of an elected representative, is not to be tried for the religiously aggravated component of the assault he has admitted upon the Respect MP George Galloway on 25th August.
Since he was heard by eyewitnesses screaming that Galloway was ‘Hitler’ and an ‘enemy of Judaism’, most reasonable people would conclude that he should be tried for the religiously-aggravated aspect of the assault. It is clear that such utterances signify a religious motive, just as much as those Islamic extremists who carry placards saying ‘behead those who insult Islam’.
In principle, there is no difference between Masterson and the two Islamic fanatics who attacked the soldier Lee Rigby with knives and meat cleavers in Woolwich. The idea that punching someone repeatedly while screaming that they are an enemy of ‘X’ religion is ‘borderline’ is a sick joke.
But the state bends over backward to get this violent extremist off the hook with a reduced sentence. This reflects the fact that he is a fascist with state backing, in support of a cause – the brutalisation of the Palestinians – that the racist British state is supporting. Masterson is an extra-parliamentary enforcer for Israeli terror in Britain. One could say that he represents a violent adjunct of the ‘Friends of Israel’ factions that dominate all three of the major political parties in the UK.
H/T Gilad Atzmon
A Jewish carer has admitted punching and kicking George Galloway, leaving him with a broken rib.
Shlomo Sand and Jewish Identity: Crystallisation of Hope
Shlomo Sand’s new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew (Verso, 2014), as he says, an extended essay (of just over 100 pages), is something that may come to be seen as very significant in years, maybe even decades to come. This Israeli writer and academic is someone of considerable courage who has braved death threats and opprobrium in Israel, not just for support for the rights of the Palestinian people, but also for his attempts to analyse the history and myths that provide the ideological, and insofar at those ideologies grip people and social classes, material basis for the oppression of the Palestinians.
Sands has written scholarly works that question in historical terms the idea that Jews were seen as in any sense a nation prior to an attempt to create a nation-like mythology for them during the mid-to-late 19th Century. His work The Invention of the Jewish People resurrected from obscurity several facts that are very inconvenient for Zionist ideologues – such as the fact that there was no exile of Jews from Palestine in late Roman times, andthat the so-called Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean, later spreading throughout Europe and the Middle East/North Africa and even wider, was the product of widespread proselytism and conversion, not exile.
He reiterated the long-known, but historically buried understanding that many, if not most, Jews of East and Central European heritage had their ultimate origin, not from the Levant, but rather from Khazaria, an early medieval kingdom and empire of Turkic origin in the far Eastern fringe of Europe, roughly coinciding with today’s Ukraine and Caucasus region, that was converted from above by its monarchy around the 8th Century. He therefore concluded, in a manner that is really very devastating to the entire Zionist project and the racist myths that justify it, that the Palestinians were much more certain to be descendants of the ancient population of Hebrews, whose state Israel claims to be the resurrection of, than the Jewish population whose armed settler movement created Israel. This resurrection of facts at least some of which were once acknowledged by many, including by many early Zionists, turns the entire rationale for Israel upside down.
He was also the author of a sequel, also highly regarded but perhaps less well-known, titled the Invention of the Land of Israel, as well as a number of shorter essays on similar topics.
The historic importance of his new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew, is that is a part of the crystallisation of a trend among radical intellectuals of Jewish and often Israeli origin that offers the potential to provide an opening whereby the Israel-Palestine conflict can be resolved in a democratic manner. This means as a matter of democratic principle that it has to be resolved through the restoration of the full rights of the Palestinians. Sand represents a part of this broad trend, with some differences, whose most prominent representative up to now has been the Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, representing people of Jewish origin who have come to recognise that the secular Jewish identity, which was the basis of the Zionist movement that created Israel, and which is still the mainstay of Israel’s ruling class, is empty and self-contradictory, and insofar as it has a political manifestation, harmful.
Third Category
At first sight, the title of Sand’s book seems impossible – no one can ‘stop being’ a person of Jewish origin, any more than someone can stop being black, European, Chinese, or of any other ethnic background. But for Sand, it is not his ethnic origin that he is renouncing, but something else. One weakness of his book is that it is not entirely clear what, if it is not an ethnic origin, Sand is renouncing and ceasing to be.
The shifting face of 21st Century capitalist racism
Down with all racial hierarchies!
There is a major contradiction at the heart of modern capitalist ideology today when it comes to questions involving the social construct of ‘race’. One pole of the contradiction is that advanced capitalist governments in the West are increasingly insistent that racism is a thing of the past, that unlike their predecessors, they are opposed in principle to racism, and that racism is against the essence of liberal capitalist meritocratic ideology. This strain of bourgeois ideology depends on an abstract model of a market economy where someone’s money, no matter their colour or origin, is as good as anyone else’s, and anyone can enjoy the rewards of the ‘hard work’ which supposedly enables capitalist ‘success’.
But while this ideology is propagated, massive racial inequalities persist, hierarchies remain and are unyielding for nearly all ethnic minority populations. It is still true that particularly non-white minorities in all the advanced capitalist countries all suffer from disproportionate rates of unemployment, low-pay when employed, precarious employment, lack of access to quality education, disproportionate levels of ill-health and greater difficulty accessing quality health care. Such minorities are also disproportionately subjected to police and state violence, to deaths in custody and at the hands of the police in general.
In the United States, where America’s first black President is in his second term, the recent protests against the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Missouri, have once again underlined that for American blacks, despite Obama and all his works, racial oppression very much remains and continues unabated. The Missouri case is one of so many over so many years and decades; it is telling that even now such things can explode into significant struggles. If society had really changed for the better in some fundamental sense, as the ideologues of capitalism claim, then there is no way that such major conflicts could erupt between large sections of a traditionally oppressed minority and the forces of the state.
Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/10/shlomo-sand-i-wish-to-cease-considering-myself-a-jew
During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his aversion to rabbis. At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric view of the world. Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected minority. In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their victims.
Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.
Conrad’s Cuts: The critique the Weekly Worker fears?
The following is the full text of my letter that was published in the Weekly Worker today, albeit cut rather dramatically.
As I have said before, the editors of any hard copy publication have complete discretion to cut items for space, as they have limits on what can fit on paper that do not affect websites such as this.
But I would venture that the particular cuts made here are very convenient politically, and spare the CPGB’s supporters from either refuting these criticisms, or allowing them to stand. For below are some points that go to the very heart of their project, as anyone who has ever paid close attention to their evolution will know. Their main claim to uniqueness on the left in Britain and internationally is the concept that the Marxist left has deformed itself by solidifying into sects where everyone is forced to defend a particular analysis and interpretation of Marxism, and where public disagreement with majority positions is banned. They claim to have re-discovered the best traditions of the Bolsheviks in seeking to build a Marxist organisation where competing would-be Marxist analyses can contend publicly for hegemony, and where minorities have the right to seek to become a majority. But in my case they simply betrayed all that.
The weakness of their position regarding my own case is such that, in their purge motion aiming to exclude me from the Communist Platform on 14 September, they tried to equate my views with those of Pierre Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. They were speaking of the apparent anti-Jewish racism of these figures, and trying by means of a feeble amalgam to say that I shared their views. But their text contained no quotes from either of these ideologues of 19th century anarchism to compare my views, as expressed in my Theses on the Jewish question, with Proudhon or Bakunin’s views on the Jewish question or indeed any other question. For anyone remotely interested in honesty and truth in left-wing politics, this is a very strange omission indeed.
However, if they had so wanted to find quotes to compare my views with, there are plenty available that show considerable similarity. Unfortunately for them, however, the quotes are from Karl Marx, Abram Leon, and Issac Deutscher. But it is unlikely that these centrist charlatans would have included such condemnatory references to these classical Marxist figures, as to do so would expose the nakedly anti-Marxist and anti-Communist character of their decision to force a break in the bloc with me which they initiated in early 2014, in forming the Communist Platform of Left Unity.
Condemnation of such classical Marxist figures, along with me, would be appropriate for them, as the tradition they stand in has more in common with renegades from Marxism such as Karl Kautsky and Max Shachtman, and dubious semi-Marxist centrist theoreticians such as Hal Draper.
Its pretty pathetic when leaders of an organisation have to invent lies about someone’s politics in order to avoid confronting honestly their real views. It is even more pathetic when this is done by the leaders of a small organisation, with little organisational muscle and whose only political capital is a reputation for truthfulness. If it gains the opposite reputation, why should anyone serious or honest want to touch it with a ten-foot pole?
Anyway, its their political funeral. Here is maybe another nail in their political coffin.
Tony Greenstein persists in retailing the silly falsehood that I have characterised him as a ‘Zionist’ in recent discussions. He is right that what I have written is ‘quite explicit’. On 6 September I published in my most comprehensive criticism of his politics, the following statement:
“Among these are … Tony Greenstein. They are outright opponents of the Zionist project and subjectively seek its destruction by revolutionary means, involving the Arab working class. “ (https://commexplor.com/2014/09/06/the-centrist-politics-of-tony-greenstein/)
So there is no need to ‘withdraw’ a statement never made, but whose exact opposite was published!
This symbolises the irrationality, capriciousness and personalism of Greenstein’s conduct in this dispute, and the lack of principle of those in the CPGB who have backed him. Greenstein says my criticisms of his identity politics and communalism amount to an accusation of Zionism. But Zionism is not the only type of Jewish identity politics.
In the early 20th Century, there existed the Bund, which opposed Zionism and Jewish migration to the Middle East, instead focusing on the preservation of Jewish culture. It demanded recognition as the sole representative of Jewish workers within Russian and Polish Social Democracy.
Lenin fought hard against this left-wing communalism, considered it divisive, and in contradiction to the duty of a revolutionary party to draw all layers of the specially oppressed behind the proletariat. This in the Tsarist empire when Jews were certainly an oppressed population.
Today, when Jews are no longer oppressed, but have achieved considerable political clout for their mainstream kind of identity politics – Zionism – in Western imperialist countries, the likes of Tony Greenstein and Moshe Machover promote, along with a sometimes very left-sounding anti-Zionism, their own alternative ‘left’ identity politics and communalism.
Thus the proliferation of self-described Jewish groups in the Palestine solidarity movement: Jews against Zionism, Jews for Boycotting Israeli goods, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, etc. This is in the context of a situation where many – including Greenstein (though to be fair: not Moshe Machover) make direct analogies with South African apartheid.
This brings us to the paradox of what would be involved if in the movement against apartheid there had appeared groups like ‘Whites against Apartheid’, ‘Whites for boycotting South African goods’, etc. Such groups, had they existed, would accept the racial segregation that was key to apartheid!
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, with ‘Jews against Zionism’ et al. Formal racial segregation is not the main feature of Zionism. Notions of ‘chosen-ness’ and alleged Jewish moral superiority are Zionism’s key ideological weapons.
No doubt at some level ‘left’ supporters of these groups think they are being clever and exploiting this notion of Jewish moral superiority against the Zionists. But this is self-defeating: conceding this strengthens the authority of this racist notion. This is a massive ideological concession to Zionism. The common thread between Zionism and some of its critics is what Israel Shahak called ‘Jewish ideology’.
This is the identity politics Greenstein is promoting, and why he supports communalist witch-hunts even against others of Jewish origin, who come, often from quite diverse standpoints, to oppose this ideology in principle, as well as Marxist critics like myself. This is centrist politics, revolutionary and anti-Zionist in words, capitulationist in deeds, and explains why Greenstein and others of his trend are touchy and cannot deal with criticism, especially from a Marxist standpoint.
It is also capitulation to this identity politics, despite the fine words in their frequent polemics against identity politics and intersectionality in Left Unity, that drives Jack Conrad and co to smear critics and betray the mission of the CPGB, effectively declaring the CPGB as a mono-ideological sect around this half-hearted and centrist ‘anti-Zionism’, while proscribing genuine Marxist anti-Zionism.
As Trotsky explained in his essay ‘Centrism and the Fourth International’ (1934), centrism is touchy and capricious, does not like to be called by its real name, and fears criticism. This sums up Tony Greenstein, as well as Jack Conrad and others.
Racism, Jews and Palestinians: Uncut letter from Weekly Worker:
The following letter, in a severely cut form, was published in the current issue of the Weekly Worker.
I am not necessarily complaining about it being cut, as hard-copy publications have limits on space that hardly exist in online publications. However, there are substantial arguments missing from the cut version that obviously have an impact on the debate, such that it is, that is supposed to be taking place on racism, Jews, and Palestinians.
I will say no more at this point, as the arguments speak for themselves.
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Tony Greenstein is still peddling the racist pseudo-definition of ‘racism’ against Jews that is used by the bourgeois mainstream to suppress criticisms of Jewish behaviour which would be unquestionable if they were directed at any other people. He states that ‘anti-semitism’ always was concerned with the ‘social role’ of Jews, but fails to explain how criticism of the ‘social role’ of any section of society can in itself be racist. It cannot: except when combined with an ideology that racialises that role, so that the racist element supersedes social criticism. This happened in the late 19th Century when the term ‘anti-Semitism’ was coined by … biological racists as an obviously ‘racial’ term. This was then extended back in time by these racists. In fact, the entire concept of ‘race’ was absent from earlier conflicts.
Jack Conrad’s Anti-Communist Witchhunt over Gaza
Some of the arguments used to justify the recent witchhunt in the Communist Platform of Left Unity by the Provisional Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker are a dead give-away about the anti-communist nature of the purge. They also show pathetic ignorance of the tradition of classical Marxism on the Jewish question. For instance, the assertion in the PCC’s anathema that “The claim that Jews do not constitute a nation within Israel but they form a ‘semi-national identity’ globally is false and it is indeed what Zionist ideology claims” can only be interpreted as a brazen attack on both Leon Trotsky, who was writing prior to the formation of the state of Israel, and also Isaac Deutscher, who wrote post-1947. Both of these classical Marxist figures, whose boots the leaders of the Weekly Worker trend are not fit to lick, went rather further than considering the Jews as a ‘semi-nation’. Both of them considered the Jews to be a fully-fledged nation.
Trotsky wrote in 1937:
“… the Jews of different countries have created their press and developed the Yiddish language as an instrument of modern culture. One must therefore reckon with the fact that the Jewish nation will maintain itself for an entire epoch to come. Now the nation cannot normally exist without a common territory. Zionism springs from this very idea. But the facts of every passing day demonstrate that Zionism is incapable of resolving the Jewish question…” (Interview with Jewish correspondents in Mexico, January 18 1937, in Leon Trotsky on the Jewish Question, Pathfinder 1970)
According to Jack Conrad/Moshe Machover ‘logic’, Trotsky must have either been a Zionist, an anti-Semite, or both.
Then there is Isaac Deutscher. He had a slightly different position, which appears to have been developed after the foundation of Israel. Writing sometime around 1966, he wrote:
“It is a tragic and macabre truth that the greatest ‘re-definer’ of the Jewish identity has been Hitler; and this is one of his minor posthumous triumphs. Auschwitz was the terrible cradle of the new Jewish consciousness and the new Jewish nation…. For those who have always stressed Jewishness and its continuity, it is strange and bitter to think that the extermination of six million Jews should have given such a new lease of life to Jewry. I would have preferred the six million men, women and children to survive and Jewry to perish. It was from the ashes of six million Jews that the phoenix of Jewry has risen. What a resurrection!” (Who is a Jew?, from The Non-Jewish Jew and other Essays, Oxford 1968, p50).
Deutscher not only considered Jews to be a nation, he credits the Jewish ‘national resurrection’ to Hitler! And to boot, he makes it quite clear that he would rather that Jewish identity cease to exist. Evidently he must be a vile anti-Semite, and were he to have had the misfortune to be in the CPGB, he would have been excommunicated by its junior-Matgamna understudies as an inveterate Jew-hater.
Centrism and fear over Gaza: “Communists” vote down equality of peoples
Reacting in fear of being falsely branded as ‘anti-semitic‘ by the political mainstream that stood aloof in August in silence while more than 2000 Arabs were butchered in four weeks of carnage by the so-called Israeli Defence Force, on September 14, one small fraction of the British far left showed its lack of revolutionary politics. The Communist Platform, a tiny grouping within ‘Left Unity’ run by the publishers of the Weekly Worker, the almost-as-tiny Communist Party of Great Britain, disgraced itself by voting, in fear of the wrath of the overwhelmingly Israel-loyal British ruling class and no doubt some of its small-scale lackeys on the left, against a key aspect of communist politics: equal opposition to all forms of racism.
This point may at first glance seem subtle or even arcane. but it is not at all. It is a crucial ideological means of manufacturing consent, to steal a phrase from Noam Chomsky, for Israel’s brutality in Western societies. This concept says that Jews are a special people, eternally the victims of racism even when their fellows in the Middle East are the ones doing the overwhelming amount of the killing, and that if anyone protests too loud about this or points the finger at Israel’s supporters in the West, they are guilty of ‘anti-semitism’ – an ultimate form of evil associated of course with Hitler. This facile smear against serious critics is a key method of social control in Western countries today.
Racist philo-semitism, not anti-Jewish racism, is dominant in the West today, and acts as massive social pressure on anyone who tries to meaningfully oppose Israeli crimes. It needs to be opposed, by decent and progressive-minded people, by a firm anti-racism. This should not need saying. But this needs to be a different kind of anti-racism, with the same basic message: the equality of all peoples, but a somewhat different emphasis than in the past. In fact today, this kind of anti-racism is the only genuine kind of anti-racism.
Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism
This set of theses will be presented for discussion at the meeting on 14th September of the Communist Platform of Left Unity
1. Of all the advanced capitalist/imperialist countries today, Israel is second only to the United States in the threat it poses to the future of humanity. It is an artificial imperialist entity introduced into the Middle East from without, and consolidated though the expulsion of the bulk of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. As a result it is in a state of permanent conflict with the Palestinians, who have a dual national consciousness both as Palestinians and as part of the national aspirations of the Arab peoples of the entire Middle East.
Israel is built entirely on territory stolen by force from a native population that is on a much higher cultural level than the indigenous victims of earlier settler states associated with European colonialism, such as the United States and Australia. Its conflict is with Arabs who have a modern national consciousness and greater cohesion than virtually any dispossessed indigenous people. Israel has therefore armed itself to the teeth and become a garrison state, stockpiling likely hundreds of nuclear weapons, and threatens the population of the semi-colonial Arab states that surround it with destruction should it fear loss of supremacy.
The Centrist Politics of Tony Greenstein
I recently received a missive from Tony Greenstein, who is trying to fill in for the failure of Moshe Machover to refute the Marxist character of the views I have been arguing on the Jewish Question. Greenstein spends comparatively little time criticising my own views, though this is an improvement on Moshe, who spent none at all. Then he launches into another tirade against me for daring to engage politically with Gilad Atzmon. However, despite the mind-bending nonsense he comes out with on this, that will surely give anyone who attempts to read it a headache, he does make a couple of political criticisms of myself that are worth responding to, and hence gives me an opportunity to elaborate my views in more depth.
Actually, a meeting is in preparation at which these questions will be discussed in the Communist Platform. At that meeting, I intend to move a set of preliminary theses on the Jewish Question today, based on an extension of the insights of Karl Marx and Abram Leon into that very important question. It will be something of a challenge for those who are currently reacting to social pressures of the same kind that led to the criminal, violent assault on George Galloway, to argue that my views are not Marxist and in some way incompatible with Communism. I would contend that, to the contrary, the views of my opponents are incompatible with Communism and a capitulation to the pressures of modern imperialism, of which the Jewish/Zionist bourgeois layers in the advanced capitalist countries are a vanguard layer.
Communist Explorations 