By Joe Gold
Readers might be aware that the Labour party has dropped its case against Diana Neslen, an 83 year old Jewish woman accused of antisemitism. Diana supported Zionism until she went to Israel and saw how it affected the Palestinians, but there has long been a strong tradition of Jewish anti-zionism on religious and political grounds.
The Chasidic revival of the Jewish religion in Ukraine and Bessarabia led its followers to pray repeatedly for “next year in Jerusalem” but this was a theological aspiration, a belief that the Messiah would come and lead them to Israel. If they had to fight with machine guns and capture the city, they would have destroyed Jerusalem. Secular Jews in Eastern Europe mainly supported the Bund which was socialist and anti-zionist.
That all changed in World War Two, when the choice was between death and Palestine. They had, if possible, to find a place in the world where they could gather together and fight for survival and even the anti-zionists turned to Israel. They fought the British, fought the armies of the surrounding countries and continued to fight the local people.
This was a disaster for the Jews and for the Palestinians, a culmination of 2,000 years of anti-semitism in Europe, a linked tragedy of the Shoah and the Naqba. Jews in Israel learned how to fight and rapidly excelled in military technologies but are now faced with a greater challenge of finding a way to live in peace in a civilised and secular state.
Starmer tying himself in knots
Meanwhile, the Labour Party, led by a lawyer, ties itself up in knots with legalistic excuses for discriminating against socialists. Diana Neslen has argued that her anti-Zionism on religious grounds is a protected belief under the Equalities Act. Labour has more than one set of guidelines on antisemitism but has accepted the definition from the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) which includes as an example of antisemitism, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
No reason has been given for dropping the case against Diana, but in terms of the definition they accept she is still an antisemite and should logically be expelled. There are many more members wrongly accused of antisemitism including dozens of Jewish socialists. LA4J (Labour for Justice) is supporting the case of Mike Howard, a Jewish atheist and lifelong socialist suspended from the Labour Party for opposing Zionism, but his death while trying to clear his name raises complex legal issues such as whether a claim of discrimination can be made in the name of his estate.
Labour could adopt the “Jerusalem declaration on Antisemitism” a more plausible explanation than the IHRA version, which holds that it is not antisemitic to criticize or oppose Zionism as a form of nationalism or to support equality for all inhabitants of Israel, but the party continues to take its advice from the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies, the Conservative authorities who claim to speak on behalf of British Jews.
Palestinians are Jews who converted to Islam in the first jihad
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the concept of Aliyah, the right of return to the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.
It is time to recognize that Palestinians are Jews who converted to Islam in the first jihad, that the similarity to Ashkenazi Jews is in the blood, in the bones, in the Y DNA haplotypes, in history and in all sources not tainted by poisonous nationalism or religious bigotry, to remind ourselves that they descend from people who were building cities in the stone age, had advance bronze age culture ahead of Egypt, created the earliest phonetic alphabets and were also the Phoenicians traders who founded cities around the Mediterranean.
Time then for Aliyah to apply equally to the Palestinian diaspora in refugee camps and throughout the world and move towards a unified secular state with equal rights, including also the Christians, Samaritans, Druze and other minorities.
There is a great opportunity in the Middle East for a science-based planned economy which could lead the world in solar desalination, land reclamation, hydrogen pipelines from the Sahara and other low carbon technologies. Science is needed, along with rational Marxist thought, to create a ” land of milk and honey”. Are these aspirations antisemitic?
