Trust Chakrabarti to spot ‘anti-Semitic anti-Zionism’

The current exposure of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is a throwback to the 1980s when I was actively involved in preventing the banning of university Jewish societies.

By BRYAN CHEYETTE
Bryan Cheyette (photo credit: Courtesy)
Bryan Cheyette
(photo credit: Courtesy)
AS SOMEONE who has been researching the history of British anti-Semitism for over three decades nothing surprises me. The current exposure of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is a throwback to the 1980s when I was actively involved in preventing the banning of university Jewish societies. The anti-Zionist hard-left (mainly Trotskyite rather than Labour) were, in the main, behind this banning campaign on the grounds that “Zionism is racism.”
A crucial aid for this campaign was “Zionism in the age of the dictators: A reappraisal” (1983), written by the American Trotskyite Lenni Brenner, which, I have shown elsewhere, is about as historically accurate as J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” novels.
Today, Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London, regards “Zionism in the age of the dictators” as his bible as it demonstrates, in Livingstone’s words, that Hitler was a Zionist “before he went mad.” His deputy mayor for seven years, Nicky Gavron, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, has distanced herself from Livingstone’s “anti-Semitism” and he has been suspended from the Labour Party.
Livingstone remains a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn who is an extraordinarily popular party leader among Labour members. But there is a strong suspicion that his popularity is a result of a new influx of the hard-left who have come in from the cold after the Blair years.
The fervently pro-Palestinian Corbyn, however, once dissociated himself from Brenner, during Brenner’s heyday, so there is no reason to suppose that he will not do so again.
I draw two conclusions from the current mainstreaming of hard-left anti-Zionism in the Labour Party.
Firstly, that at times this anti-Zionism does cross the line into anti-Semitism and it is crucial to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies (including the settlement of post-1967 occupied territories) and anti-Semitic anti-Zionism that constructs Israel as a pariah state.
I have every faith that the Labour Party inquiry chaired by Shami Chakrabarti (a human rights lawyer) ‒ with professor David Feldman (an international specialist in British anti-Semitism) and baroness Janet Royall (a renowned activist against Labour Party anti-Semitism) ‒ will carefully make these crucial distinctions and report back by the end of June.
I also reject the campaign against this inquiry fueled, ironically, by two opposing sides. Those on the hard Left deny any instances of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, which they argue is manufactured by Blairites to undermine Corbyn. At the same time, some in the Anglo-Jewish community are doing all they can to discredit the inquiry by attacking Chakrabarti and Feldman at every opportunity.
My own position, as a scholar, is that the Anglo-Jewish community should trust a leading attorney, along with a specialist on anti-Semitism, to be disinterested when identifying anti-Semitic anti- Zionism which, all agree, needs to be banished from the Labour Party as soon as possible.