I believe in national self-determination. That means that in current circumstances I fully accept the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace, freedom, security. I also believe in exactly the same thing for the Palestinian people.
I also believe passionately in anti-racism. It would therefore never enter my head to be soft on anti-Semitism. Nor would it enter my head to be weak in calling out the actions of a government that didn’t treat all its citizens equally or which acted in an oppressive way towards people living in particular territories. I think that the state of Israel is guilty of exactly that. I also believe that there are plenty of Palestinian leaders who would act in exactly the same way if not worse if they had the power to do so and that their attitudes towards the rights of Jewish people is equally despicable and must be challenged every bit as strongly.
One of the commonest mistakes that people on the left make is to fail to criticise leaders of national liberation struggles because it is perceived as undermining their fight. When those leaders get into power and proceed to act in appalling ways that leaves the left struggling to explain why they didn’t see the signs of the problem emerging. Sometimes, with astonishing naivety that failure to recognise horrible actions persists even when the former leaders of the national liberations struggle are sitting in comfortable offices inflicting their own oppressions. That is what happened with Mugabe and you can see much the same muddled thinking with regard to Syrian government from far too many people on the left. Just because someone uses the language of socialism doesn’t make their government socialist, equal, free or worthy of our support. It is possible to be against oppression coming from any government. We don’t have to be silent about the actions of the enemies of our enemies.
Silence is even more unforgivable when it comes to remembering mass murder and deliberate attempts to wipe out another race. What happened to the Jewish people during the holocaust must never be forgotten. That doesn’t give the Jewish state the right to behave in racist ways towards other peoples and to steal land in the occupied territories. It also doesn’t give any other nation the right to try and wipe the state of Israel off the face of the earth. Importantly it also means that more than one holocaust needs to be remembered and the lessons learned. How many people in the state of Israel are taught properly about the number of “Gypsy” people who went into the ovens? The only difference between the experience of the two peoples is that one has a state to speak out for the memory of the huge loss whilst the deaths of the other race are routinely forgotten by all too many. There is something uniquely horrible about the sheer industrialisation of the Nazi murder machine but unfortunately there have been all too many other holocausts and all too many deniers. Burundi and Armenia come to mind and some of the actions of Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot are not so very different in scale of the horrors to what Hitler inflicted on the Jewish people.
In the face of crimes of such enormity it is incumbent on each one of us to keep challenging ourselves to ensure that we are free of the kinds of thinking that led up to the Nazi death camps. The attitude that the rights of one people are somehow special and that other races are somehow of less worth than your own is where it all starts. That kind of thinking led many ordinary German people, and their accomplices from a whole series of other nations, to be able to usher young children into the showers where they were killed. It is entirely legitimate for Jewish people to challenge any of us and to test out whether we have any part of those attitudes within us. It is also entirely legitimate to challenge Jewish people to test out whether any of their attitudes towards Palestinians contain any of those dangerous seeds.
Throwing accusations of anti-Semitism at anyone who raises that challenge when the Israeli state acts badly is not fair or reasonable or in the best long-term interests of the Jewish people. It cheapens and weakens the accusation.
This means that it is perfectly legitimate for Jewish representatives to challenge Jeremy Corbyn and to test out whether he is in any way tolerating attitudes within his party that are anti-Semitic. For what it is worth I don’t think he has an anti-Semitic bone in his body and he has an excellent track record on anti-racism. I do, however, think that he has a tendency to be seriously muddled in his thinking about the leaders of peoples engaged in struggles against oppressive states. I believe that he sees many of the actions of the Israeli state as highly oppressive and racist in its treatment of Palestinian people. I think he is right about that. I don’t think he has been as good at recognising the shortcomings of the leaders of the Palestinian authorities. Being silent or turning a blind eye to bad behaviour on any side of a dispute is not acceptable so some degree of fair and balanced criticism of his stance is quite reasonable.
That said, the campaign against him this week has been out of all proportion to any weaknesses in his thinking. To have clicked “like” on a comment about a photograph that he glanced at a couple of years back is not exactly a major thought crime. It is a piece of carelessness not a pattern of evil intent. If it is worthy of this degree of media criticism then an awful lot of us might have good cause to worry about which facebook pages we have accidently liked at some time in the past.
It seems to me that it is entirely legitimate to ask questions of Jeremy Corbyn about how well he applies his principles of anti-racism and of championing the rights of all peoples to live in peace and freedom. I just wonder how many of those who are making that challenge with such enthusiasm pass the tests that they are setting to the same standard? Are his critics passionately challenging the oppression of peoples from all races? Or are they limiting their concerns to the experiences of only one?
As I said at the start, the thing about principles is that they need to be applied equally regardless of whether they are convenient.