It’s possible to be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic. This is true irrespective of one’s politics. In 1956, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower ordered Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to cease and desist from the Anglo-French-Israeli adventure at the Suez Canal, tout suite. In a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders won rapturous applause from an audience in Brooklyn (!) when he called on the world “to work together to help the Palestinian people.”
It’s even possible to have qualms about Zionism and not be anti-Semitic. The Haredim, to take a hard case, believe that the mere existence of the state of Israel is an abomination that actually prevents the Messiah from appearing.
There are paradoxes, contradictions, perhaps even ironies in all of the above. But Jeremy Corbyn’s conduct in what the British press insists on calling “a row” over anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party doesn’t even rise to the level of ambiguous.
Recent months have brought us tape of Corbyn accusing the BBC of caving to “bias” regarding Israel’s right to exist; pictures of him attending a wreath-laying for the terrorists who slaughtered Jewish athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich; Facebook comments comparing to Diego Rivera a London graffiti artist whose “work” featured hook-nosed Jewish caricatures; and still more video of him saying Zionists had “no sense of English irony” despite “having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives.”
This list is not exhaustive, and Corbyn’s surly, evasive non-answers to questions about Labour’s anti-Semitism have frayed his reputation for an almost pedantic commitment to courtesy — a commitment that had won him praise (ranging from the grudging to the rapturous) from erstwhile conservatives.
How is it that the leader of one of the world’s oldest social democratic parties, in the land that gave refuge to Marx, has such appallingly (and dangerously) retrograde views? Part of the answer may be that Corbyn’s socialism is itself reactionary.
Thanks to the utter incompetence of the Tories (whose Brexit frolicking is so much like a Marx Brothers movie—except without the gags), Corbyn stands a real chance of becoming prime minister of one of American’s most important allies. He also is being held up as a potential mentor to American radicals.
After the Second World War ended, Stalin needed to justify helping himself to huge swathes of pre-war Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic republics, lands he had originally seized under his alliance with Hitler. His solution was “national communism” whereby the “new” countries would purify themselves of national minorities—particularly their ethnic Germans—to create communist republics of “pure” Poles, Ukrainians, etc. This amazing story is told in horrifying detail by Prof. Timothy Snyder’s magisterial book, “Bloodlands” about the Hitler-Stalin abattoir in Eastern Europe. (I apologize in advance for over-simplifying his remarkable work.)
For obvious reasons, Jews — the primary victims of Hitler and in many cases some of the fiercest anti-Nazi partisans—didn’t quite “fit” in the national communist scheme. One answer — a national homeland for Jews — recommended itself enough that Stalin was among the first to vote for the creation of Israel at the U.N. (He also thought it would strike a blow against British colonialism, which, in a way, it did.) But when he saw the enthusiasm with which Soviet Jews celebrated their new “homeland,” the old gargoyle surrendered to his lifelong paranoia. Propaganda began to circulate about “rootless cosmopolitans,” those comrades who might have dual loyalties. Several prominent Jews were arrested, tortured and more than a few were killed as Stalin raved about “a doctor’s plot” to kill patriotic Russian communists. We may have been spared a second Holocaust only by Stalin’s death in 1953.
Corbyn was still in short pants when all of this occurred, but the Stalinist party line never changed. In fact, it began to recirculate with force in the late 1960s, when Corbyn was coming to political age. In 1967, LBJ gave enthusiastic support to Israel in the Six-Day War, in part because he was hoping to bargain for Jewish support for his war in Vietnam. This was enough to convince a great many comrades that Israel was part of the Imperial problem they were resisting in the first place.
Meanwhile, anti-Communist uprisings broke out in Central in Eastern Europe — the largest in Poland in 1967, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Since many of the renegades were themselves socialists or even communists, it wouldn’t do to paint them as reactionary. So the regimes focused on their cosmopolitan background, with the lethal designation “Troskyite” making a reappearance.
Corbyn couldn’t have missed those gibes, and he remains loyal to Russia to this day. He also talks enthusiastically about a post-Brexit Britain giving “socialism in one country” a go. So whatever else his rhetoric about dual loyalties represents, it’s certainly not a radical break from the past. And you don’t have to be English to appreciate the irony that Corbyn’s worship of the gravedigger of communism has helped breathe new life into the socialism of fools.
Bill Myers lives and works in Washington, DC. Email him at [email protected]. He tweets from @billcaphill.
