A welcome contribution to a necessary debate

Submitted by AWL on 18 January, 2022 - 5:18 Author: Daniel Randall
Renton

Daniel Randall reviews David Renton's Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong (Routledge, 2021).


David Renton's Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn from It is a welcome addition to a slowly but steadily expanding discourse that aims to develop a critique of left antisemitism that is explicitly from the left, and for the left.

Renton and I corresponded while I was writing my own book on left antisemitism, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists, a correspondence I found useful and which I feel helped improve my manuscript. We have also collaborated since on a dialogue on the issue for the US socialist website Tempest, and on a public panel hosted by Labour Party activists in Lewes. I hope we will repeat such collaborations in future. I find his work on the issue thoughtful and thought-provoking, and would recommend his book to anyone interested in getting to better grips with the issue of antisemitism on the British left. He and I also differ on a number of key issues; this review will gesture towards some of them, although for reasons of time and space it is not intended to be a point-by-point exposition of the things in Labour's Antisemitism Crisis I disagree with.

Renton's starting point is that “the left has tolerated antisemitism, or at least a mindset which comes close to antisemitism – an ignorance about what most British Jews think combined with an indifference to the thought of antagonising them.” The organisational framework of Renton's study, as per the title, is the Labour Party. He treats “the left” broadly, looking at a number of prominent individuals and broadly left-wing opinion, as expressed in, for example, left-wing Facebook groups. There is far less focus on the organisations and institutions of the far left, either today or historically. That choice of focus has its advantages, as it can tell us things about antisemitism within broadly left-wing discourse we wouldn't necessarily learn just by diving into the archives of the far-left press. But it also has weaknesses, in that it misses out key historical context for how antisemitic ideas have been produced, reproduced, and circulated via sections of the far left as an organised movement.

Renton is a lawyer by profession, and brings an impressive forensic rigour to this work, effectively re-litigating a number of key episodes drawn from the scandals and furores that dogged Jeremy Corby's leadership of the Labour Party - including the Mear One mural, Jackie Walker's comments on Jews and the slave trade, and Ken Livingstone's comments on Hitler and Zionism - and explains, in a lawyerly but nonetheless accessible fashion, exactly why they were antisemitic. That, for me, is the book's most valuable contribution. For readers who already feel instinctively that those episodes were problematic, Renton provides depth and detail. For readers less sure, but prepared to approach the text in good faith and with a relatively open mind, that forensic re-litigation ought to be able to cut through the emotion-ridden cacophony of social media “debate” to prove that allegations of antisemitism were not “smears”.

It is true that supporters of Israel sometimes exploit allegations of antisemitism to deflect criticisms of Israeli policy; Renton also acknowledges the prevalence of the opposite phenomenon, the invocation of “support for the Palestinians” to deflect allegations of antisemitism, asking readers to consider a left antisemite who self-justifies by saying: “I did not mean to deny the Holocaust, blame Jews for the slave trade, portray them as outsiders in the Labour Party, etc... all I meant to do was support Palestinians against Israel”.

A chapter considering antisemitism in the context of a global resurgence of far-right authoritarian nationalisms – Trump, Orban, and others – is an important reminder that left antisemitism is not the only, or even the main, form of antisemitism now vigorous in the world, and that allying with or promoting forces on the right because they pose as allies to the Jewish community against other forms of antisemitism, as some Jewish communal figures have done, would be politically catastrophic. A chapter on the limits of Corbynite “populism” - pushing vague concepts of “the many” versus “the few”, or identifying “elites” who “rig the economy” as the source of social ills – rightly concludes that “the less 'populist' and more 'socialist' he became, the better Corbyn’s politics were – not just more effective at winning voters, but better protected against anti- Jewish distortion.” I would dissent, however, from the chapter's view that some degree of populist framing is necessary or even positively desirable for the left; populist frames always cut against class politics.

Reflecting on the impacts and effects of so much political discourse now being conducted on social media, Renton argues that Marxists need to be better at intervening in online discourse to call out conspiracy theories expressed in left-wing online spaces. That would certainly be helpful, although I wonder whether the very form of social media discourse – which do not led themselves to considered reflection and reassessment – cuts against such efforts. An “all-fronts” political-educational campaign, which attempts to reach people “in the real world” as well as online, with longer and more in-depth material than can be conveyed in a Facebook discussion, is needed. The challenges presented to that need by, for example, the ongoing pandemic are real, and not ones to which I claim to have easy solutions.

Inevitably, the book involves some assessment of the politics of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Renton's position is more maximally “anti-Zionist” than mine: he is for a single-state settlement and is strongly pro-BDS. Nevertheless, he criticises the wilder, conspiracy-theorist forms of anti-Zionism common in some sections of the left, and devotes a whole chapter to criticising the “hounding” of the (centre-right, and strongly Zionist) Labour MP Luciana Berger.

As far as I know, Renton does not consider himself to have reassessed or rejected the basic political framework on Israel/Palestine he held during his decades of membership of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In my view, the SWP's perspective on Israel/Palestine has always been wholly “campist” - seeing Israel and its people, certainly those descended from European settlers/refugees, as an illegitimate colonial implantation in the region, part of the camp of imperialism, that will be defeated by what the SWP historically referred to as an anti-imperialist “Arab revolution”. That campism has led the SWP into support for explicitly antisemitic forces such as Hamas and Hezbollah; to agitate, in the 1980s, for bans on campus Jewish Societies because of their “Zionism”; and, once, to uncritically publish a letter railing against “Zionist influence” at the BBC which turned out to be from a prominent National Front activist.

I see the campist programme itself as logically antisemitic, as it is premised on the inadmissibility of any expression of collective rights for the Israeli Jews as a national people, and implicitly designates the majority of the world's Jews who, for understandable historical reasons, maintain an affinity with Israel and the idea of Jewish nationhood – not only as political opponents but mortal enemies. Renton's book contains much detailed statistical description of the historical and contemporary mechanics of Israel's oppression of the Palestine, but does not polemicise directly for a one-state/BDS programme. He rejects the idea that the left should treat “Zionism”, as expressed in mainstream Jewish communal life in Britain, as equivalent to “racism” or “fascism” that should be no-platformed: he commends veteran Labour leftist and Momentum founder Jon Lansman for engaging with the Jewish Chronicle and attempting to reach out to “mainstream” Jewish opinion. It seems implausible to me, in the light of what he has written in Labour's Antisemitism Crisis, that Renton could reread the SWP's historic analysis on Israel/Palestine and Zionism, for example the 1986 pamphlet Israel: The Hijack State, or consider its campaigns against Jewish Societies in the 70s and 80s, and not feel some reassessment of the underlying perspectives is necessary.

In general in Renton's book, there is sometimes too much focus on how the left presents its arguments, and not enough on the roots of the ideas and assumptions that impel antisemitic speech or actions, meaning Renton sometimes comes across more as someone advising the left on how to better package its ideas or practise so as not to “antagonise” Jews rather than someone attempting to critique what might be antisemitic in the substance of those ideas or practise themselves. For example, concluding a reflection on Jeremy Corbyn's association with and praise for the Palestinian Islamist Raed Salah, who was accused of recycling antisemitic “blood libel” narratives, Renton explicitly states that leftists should have “defended [Corbyn's action]”, just in different terms: “Corbyn's supporters on the left”, he argues, “might have explained Salah’s words in terms of the brutality of the occupation”, rather than “defending Corbyn by insisting that Salah had been vindicated of the accusation of blood libel when the courts had done nothing of the sort.”

Despite – or rather, in some ways, because of – these differences and disagreements, I hope Renton's book is widely read and discussed. Its rigorous re-litigation of the key flashpoints of the 2015-2020 period will help educate and persuade activists, and even where Renton advances arguments with which I disagree, I believe the book will help generate and contribute to a necessary debate.

Moishe Postone, perhaps the pre-eminent Marxist theorist of modern antisemitism, called antisemitism an “antihegemonic” ideology, offering its adherents “pseudo-emancipatory” narratives. As such it poses a particular threat to left-wing politics specifically; acknowledging that threat, and rejecting the notion that antisemitism is either solely a phenomenon of the far right, or a fabrication of supporters of Israel, is therefore a matter of ideological self-interest for the left. David Renton's contribution to the effort to acknowledge and confront that threat is welcome, and I look forward to continuing to discuss both our differences and common ground.

Comments

Submitted by AWL on Thu, 23/12/2021 - 11:32

On his blog here.

Submitted by AWL on Thu, 23/12/2021 - 14:48

In reply to by AWL

Daniel Randall replies to David Renton

Thanks to David for his reply to my review, linked to in the comment above. I will endeavour to keep this further reply relatively brief, as I'm sure we could go back and forth (or round and round) on these issues for some time.

First, on Israel/Palestine: David writes that my review “asks whether [he] holds to a position of seeing the Jewish population of Israel as 'settlers' in the sense of the settler-colonial analogy.” But my review didn't ask that; I criticised the SWP's perspective of “seeing Israel and its people, certainly those descended from European settlers/refugees, as an illegitimate colonial implantation in the region, part of the camp of imperialism, that will be defeated by what the SWP historically referred to as an anti-imperialist 'Arab revolution'.”

I didn't mention the “settler-colonial analogy”, to which I don't particularly object, although I think the term is often deployed with rather less than the analytical exactitude those who pioneered it intended, and, as Arnon Degani has convincingly argued, often with the effect of obfuscating rather than clarifying. What I do object to is the programmatic conclusions often extrapolated from that analogy – that Israel's origins in a process of colonial settlement, and its ongoing colonial relationship to the Palestinians, represent a kind of original sin which renders any expression of self-determination by the Israeli Jewish national people necessarily illegitimate, and meaning that the conflict is only resolvable by undoing Israel's existence, rather than reforming it. In my view, that programme, as I argued in my review and at greater length in my own book, has unavoidably antisemitic implications, and is a core component of contemporary left antisemitism. I also believe strongly that any analytical framework that sees no qualitative difference between a recently-arrived Jewish emigrant from New York, who has come to build or extend a West Bank outpost, and a third-generation descendant of Holocaust refugees or Mizrahi immigrants/expellees living in pre-1967 Israel, is functionally useless and cannot serve democratic politics.

David laments that supporters of Israel “often require you, as the price of having an opinion, to first of all set out a democratic egalitarian answer to the conflict, one at several stages away from the present day.” I don't know whether he considers me a “supporter of Israel” in this context, but I don't see setting out a “democratic egalitarian answer to the conflict” as “the price of having an opinion”: I see it as a responsibility of having democratic, egalitarian politics. Isn't advancing democratic, egalitarian politics – through class struggle – the point of being active as a socialist? And if the answers we might advocate for are “several stages away from the present day”, as they invariably will be in most contemporary national conflicts, then we don't have to have a mechanical blueprint for getting from here to there, but surely we do need to sketch some perspective for how that answer connects to contemporary struggles, and how they might bring it closer?

I'm glad David retrospectively opposes SWSS support for banning campus Jewish Societies, and I agree with his comparison of that agitation with the views of David Miller today. David seems to brush it off as a marginal phenomenon confined to “very few groups”. But as ever with this issue, the key question is one of quality more than quantity. If even a “very few” of the student branches of one of the largest revolutionary socialist groups were conducting an antisemitic agitation on campuses, doesn't that a) reveal a significant problem worth reckoning with, and b) necessitate some kind of interrogation of the underlying political assumptions that led them to believe such agitation was consistent with, and would help advance, socialist politics?

This brings me to perhaps the central issue in David's reply to my review – whether simply focusing on the Labour Party, in and of itself, was justified, or whether a longer-range look at the wider organised far left, is necessary. David's view is that the organised far left was “missing in action” in Corbynism. That is true in one very literal sense, in that two of the largest far-left groups – the SWP and the Socialist Party – largely stood on the sidelines of the whole process, waiting for it to fail so they could claim their pre-existing analysis, that intervention in the Labour Party is pointless, had been vindicated. But the political common sense of various far-left tendencies and traditions was very much present at the level of ideology, even if the groups which had developed that common sense were not influential organisationally.

People's ideas don't come out of nowhere, or drop into their heads fully formed. I argue in my book that many of the older “returners” to the Labour Party during the Corbyn surge were politically formed by a 1970s and 80s left in which campism, and the left antisemitism linked to it, were prevalent. The Workers' Revolutionary Party, for example, is today completely marginal and irrelevant as an organisation, but its ideas helped politically educate a layer of activists during a period of greater size and influence in the 1970s and 80s, who in turn went on to educate others around them. The ideas might biodegrade somewhat along the way, but they are still there. Or, to give another example, the CPB itself, or other Stalinist parties, had a marginal impact on Corbynism, but the wider milieu around the Morning Star was influential, perhaps more so than any other single current. Attempting to analyse left antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn without looking at its longer-range historical roots therefore seems limited. It's not a matter of counting up “the number of prominent individuals who were acting as fellow-travellers of the left groups”, as David puts it; someone can express a political common sense formed by a particular tradition or organisation without necessarily being a member or fellow-traveller of that organisation.

As I noted in my review, David's decision to eschew a focus on the organised far left also has advantages, as there are things we can learn about contemporary left antisemitism – for example, how it directly interacts with right-wing populism – by looking at, for example, left-wing Facebook groups that we won't necessarily learn by reading copies of News Line from 1983. But I maintain that, without the longer-range historical view, ideological roots are missed.

Fortunately, and at the risk of vulgar self-promotion, I think this is one respect in which our two books, despite their differences, complement each other: reading both alongside each other should allow readers to make at least some judgement as to how significant the longer-range trends on the far left, many of which I trace centrally back to Stalinism's “anti-Zionist” campaigns of the 1950s on, were as formative ideological influences on Labour's antisemitism crises, and how many of them flow into an ongoing common sense that, beyond matters of messaging and presentation, we need to comprehensively uproot and replace.

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