Connoisseurs of Jew-hatred may differ over whether the world’s most influential anti-Semitic institution is the government of Saudi Arabia, the government of Iran, or the websites of al Qaeda and ISIS. It is easier, however, to identify the world’s most respectable anti-Semitic institution. That shameful prize goes to Britain’s Labour party.
This week, Labour failed yet again to expel Ken Livingstone—the ex-mayor of London and a man who never met an Israeli he didn’t hate—for identifying Zionism with Nazism. “Let’s remember,” Livingstone told the BBC in April 2016, “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism—this before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews.”
Livingstone was referring to the 1933 Transfer Agreement between the Nazi regime and pre-state Zionists in the British-controlled Palestine Mandate. Under the agreement, German Jews consented to be despoiled of their money and possessions in return for a ticket to Palestine. Between 1933 and 1940, some 60,000 German Jews had the temerity to save their lives in this fashion. Hitler was “supporting Zionism” in the same sense that the Atlantic slave trade had “supported” the emigration of Africans to the New World.
It took a year for the Labour party to hold an inquiry. On his way into the hearing, Livingstone doubled down. “So you had, right up until the start of the Second World War, real collaboration. … The SS set up training camps so that German Jews who were going there could be trained to cope with a different sort of country. … He [Hitler] signed a law that said the Zionist flag and the Swastika were the only flags that could be flown in Germany.”
Again, Livingstone traduced the historical record. No serious historian endorses Livingstone’s interpretation of the Transfer Agreement’s moral ambiguities and imbalance of power. No serious historian would describe the desperate actions of pre-state Zionists and German Jews as “real collaboration,” for “real collaboration” works toward a common goal. Hitler wanted to expel Jews from Germany; he did not wish to create a Jewish state. Zionism benefited from the escape of German Jews; Zionists did not wish to serve Nazi goals.
Livingstone’s source, the Trotskyite polemicist Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1984), has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked; Brenner, who called Zionism a “Shylock operation,” is frequently cited by neo-Nazis and hard-left anti-Zionists. Livingstone claims that Zionism in the Age of the Dictators “shows a shared common belief between the Nazis and the Zionists in preserving their race from interracial marriage and things like that … that’s why they had a working relationship.”
Livingstone has a long history of malicious assertions about Jews and Zionism. In the 1980s, as co-editor of the Labour Herald, Livingstone printed an article alleging that Zionists had prevented the rescue of European Jews from the Holocaust, and a cartoon showing Menachem Begin, whose family was murdered in the Holocaust, wearing a Nazi uniform and giving the Nazi salute while standing atop a pile of corpses.
Jews, Livingstone informed Anglo-Jewish leaders in 1984, are “basically a tribe of Arabs.” Their influence, he wrote in Labour Herald, is a “distortion running right the way through British politics.” In Livingstone’s lunatic view, Jews turned away from Labour in the 1980s not because of people like Livingstone, but because they were taking orders form Menachem Begin: “[S]uddenly the Jews became reactionaries, turned Right, nearly to be fascists.” Bizarrely, he told the Israeli newspaper Davar that “extremist Jews” were organizing “paramilitary organizations,” and that it was “obvious that those Jews will try to hurt me and my reputation.”
As London’s mayor, Livingstone endorsed the homophobic and anti-Semitic Islamist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi as “one of the most authoritative Muslim scholars in the world today,” invited al-Qaradawi to London, and gave him an official reception at City Hall.
In February 2005, Oliver Finegold, a journalist for London’s Evening Standard, asked Livingstone, then the mayor of London, a question as he left a party. Livingstone, who knew Finegold was Jewish, told Finegold that he was “just like a concentration camp guard.” An internal inquiry by the Greater London Authority (GLA) suspended him for a month, but the High Court overturned its finding on appeal.
In 2006, when Livingstone fell out with the property tycoons Simon and David Reuben over sites for the forthcoming 2012 London Olympics, he told them to “go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollah.” The GLA launched another inquiry. Livingstone insisted that he had not known that the Reuben brothers were Jewish—he thought he was insulting Iranian Muslims—and was acquitted. He did not explain why “David Reuben” and “Simon Reuben” had sounded like Muslim names.
After losing the 2008 mayoral election to Boris Johnson, Livingstone hosted a program on Iran’s propaganda channel, Press-TV, and accused Israel of the “systematic murder of innocent Arabs,” implying genocide. In 2012, when Livingstone ran again for mayor, a group of prominent London Jewish supporters of the Labour party met with Livingstone to, as they put it, “explore ways in which Ken could re-connect with Jewish voters.” In 2010, a similar meeting had ended in acrimony. This one did too.
The Jewish Labourites concluded that Livingstone “determines Jews as a religious group, but does not accept Jews as an ethnicity or as a people.” Despite this, at their meeting he “used the words Zionist, Jewish, Israeli interchangeably, as if they meant the same, and pejoratively.” He stated that he did not expect Jews to vote Labour because “the Jewish community is rich.” The Jewish Labourites concluded that Livingstone’s fondness for anti-Semitic memes” accorded with his apparent alignment with “the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.”
These attitudes accorded with Livingston’s courting of the rapidly growing Muslim vote in London, and his hard-left loathing of bourgeois capitalists and the allies of Yankee imperialism. Livingstone was one of several London Labour politicians to build a “Red-Green” alliance in Britain’s capital in the 1980s. In 2015, another of them, Jeremy Corbyn, exploited the party’s nomination process to launch a coup against the New Labour centrists who had controlled the party for more than two decades.
Since then, the once-repressed voice of the hard left has dominated the party. An unending series of scandals has exposed the anti-Semitism at the core of left-wing anti-Zionism. To the mounting disgust of many Labour members and MPs, Corbyn and the party leadership have shown themselves unwilling to confront the problem. This week, Livingstone was suspended from a Labour office for two years; the ruling is retroactive, which means that he served one year while waiting for the inquiry.
This is not a matter of free speech. A political party is a private association, bound not by laws but party rules, which can be changed to suit the occasion. Labour’s inability to expel Livingstone establishes an informal guideline that racism against Jews—and the accompanying libels of genocide by Israel and the manipulation of media and finance by Jews—is acceptable. Labour, the party that sees institutional racism at work everywhere, has institutionalized its preferred form of racism. Labour, established by social democrats and often run by them, used to be a broad church. Now, the party that created the welfare state has collapsed into a cult for sectarian bigots, and Britain lacks a plausible party of opposition.
After his acquittal, Livingstone naturally blamed his problems on the Jews. “What caused the offence were those people who opened the pages of the Jewish Chronicle [Britain’s Jewish newspaper of record] and saw the claim I said Hitler was a Zionist, the claim I said Jews were Nazis,” he told the BBC.
The truth is that it was the BBC who broke the story. The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly, was perhaps the last national news source to cover it. But then, to racist fools like Livingstone, everything comes down to a Jewish conspiracy.
