I am so grateful to this wonderful podcast for giving me 40 minutes to set out my thoughts on the stakes of this moment. Please give it a listen, I got to explain where I'm coming from as a Jewish Marxist:
I was sent this image by a member of my family in Israel. He was delighted that an IDF soldier has written my name on a missile to be dropped on people in Gaza - all because I am a Jew who wants every human being to be free from the river to the sea.
An American citizen was just shot in the head and murdered while working as a journalist, her home was then invaded by Israeli police, and all the United States can do is to call for an investigation. No condemnation of the ethnostate they call a democracy.
School student heroes at Pimlico Academy walk out after their headteacher bans afros and colourful hijabs. They call it racism.
Ten minutes down the road on the very same day, Etonians in parliament announce there is no institutional racism in Britain. Whose side are you on?
To be clear: I am not the victim here. I just keep thinking this instrument of death with my name on it could be dropped on a hospital or a refugee camp, while some schmuck laughs with pride. Zionism has warped our souls. We march to save everyone in Palestine from this horror.
There's an old joke about two Jews sitting on a park bench in Berlin in 1930. One's reading Die Rote Fahne, the newspaper of the Communist Party. He turns in horror to see his friend reading Der Sturmer, the Nazi paper: "why are you reading that filth?!" he asks...
As my employer -
@Columbia
University - calls armed riot police into campus to smash a peaceful protest against a genocide, we must all speak out. My former students have been arrested. I'm proud of you. History will be too. Remember what I said in our first class last year:
Israeli soldiers sang "there are no uninvolved civilians," then shot people waving white flags. Israeli civilians rush to Gaza to block aid from the starving. "War" simply does not explain that: it is the settler's existential, genocidal struggle to clear the land.
"Simple!" his friend replies: "in your paper, it's all bad news - fascism on the march, attacks on Jews, big business backing the Nazis. But in my paper, I read that we Jews control the world!"
In 60 seconds on the BBC yesterday, I tried to explain how much damage is done by the cynical use of antisemitism as a partisan weapon to attack the left.
There has been a hit piece on me in the Jewish News, which is fine; they're continuing a venerable tradition of worrying about leftwing Jews! But I wanted to respond to two claims.
Imagine caring so little about Jews that you casually equate opposition to global police violence with hating us, just so you have an excuse to sack an old political opponent
I had a brief moment on TV to challenge the miserable horror of turning antisemitism into a factional battering ram against the left - I hope people find this valuable
Remember that in its dying days, the apartheid state in South Africa escalated on all fronts - Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, assassinations. The settlers are regionally isolated and so they lash out: the Zionist state looks impregnable now but freedom will come.
Yesterday I watched Mick Lynch call for a post-neoliberal counter-inflationary policy - cutting high profits to raise low wages - and insisting "nobody is illegal!" in front of an RMT banner emblazoned with portraits of James Connolly and Claudia Jones. Hope lives.
As long as I live, I will never forget the Andover estate in Finsbury Park yesterday - a multiracial community full of utter contempt for the Labour Party and hope and faith in their MP, who loves them and their values and will never apologise for it
@paulmasonnews
I honestly think you taunting Jews about anti-Semitic attacks - to tar and target our anti-racist support for Palestinian freedom - is one of the most shameful and embarrassing lows you have ever reached.
Christmas cancelled suddenly, hours to No Deal, one by one European countries shut their doors to Britain where COVID rages amid criminal mismanagement, and the governing party polls at 40%. Wouldn't it be nice to have an opposition that actually opposed and inspired right now?
While Britain funds a genocide, three women of colour - one from Gaza - have been convicted by a British judge for their clothing on a protest and we will hear not a whimper from the powerful people who wail about "free speech" when someone puts a trigger warning on a racism
Here in east London, school students have walked out of classes today to march. In the halls of Harvard, Jewish students are risking arrest occupying buildings to insist that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same. The coalitions of the future are being born: for freedom
It is not, then, a march against antisemitism. The thousands of Jews who have joined Jewish blocs for Palestinian life and freedom in recent weeks are all told that we are not welcome. It is a march against Palestinian freedom, using Jewish safety as its awful pretext.
BBC journalists have rebelled against the corporation's failure to "humanise" Palestinians, revealing its policy of using terms like "massacre" only to refer to Hamas and not Israel. Strong insinuations here of behind-the-scenes racism in the coverage:
I try, in my personal life and in my politics, to set a kinder example: to cherish people and to seek a world as beautiful as people are. I fail very, very often. But I think it's something worth trying.
Sunday's march comes a day after a march for Palestinian freedom. I'll be speaking there, on Saturday. In a different world, I'd love to march on Sunday too - I am a proud Jew who hates racism - but its organisers have framed it as a hostile response to support for Palestine.
If "humanitarian intervention" really existed there would be a NATO no-fly zone over Gaza right now - instead we watch as people are pummelled and all the most powerful states fund the genocide and we cry and we are called extremists for it
It meant that I want a world where people are not penned into open air prisons, where every state premised on dispossession is beaten. I want it so that everyone everywhere may live in peace and freedom. Jewish history teaches me to yearn for such a world.
The free people of South Africa and the free people of Yemen know the savagery of imperial power too well to abandon Gaza now. Thousands of us in London will march tomorrow to say this global coalition for human freedom stretches even into the heartlands of empire.
@lukeakehurst
Your implication that the way to keep Jews safe is to conflate Israel and Jews while denying facts of ethnic cleansing visible to millions - rather than to insist that Israel's violence has more to do with settler colonialism than with Judaism - actively endangers Jews.
A thought experiment: if after Nat Turner's slave uprising - which killed whites indiscriminately - black people elsewhere carried images of Nat Turner and were then rounded up by states funding the slave trade, should leftists take to pulpits to condemn those protestors?🧵
I don’t think it’s good to celebrate an attack which leads to the deaths of hundreds of civilians.
These guys handed themselves in. What they did was daft but thankfully they got a suspended sentence. I got 200 hours community service for throwing a bottle of water. (1/2)
I was a teenager in 2010 when I saw police on horses charge at school students, after driving a van into the road for protesters to attack and journalists to photograph. Children became "rioters". Last night they did the same in Bristol. Our heroic media will again be pliant.
I tweeted from an anti-fascist demo, now my replies are full of this. Racists claim to love Jews when it serves their Islamophobia (and they share with Zionists a language of "Western civilisation") but I prefer their hatred. We Jews, Blacks, Asians, queers - we will destroy you.
If 2023 brought the first livestreamed genocide, it showed two truths of our world - that Western power is at best indifferent to enormous violence, and that all over the world there are really wonderful people of conscience. In 2024, let's learn both lessons
Walid Daqqa was punished over and over - his name kept off prisoner exchange lists, denied a transplant that could have saved his life, now the prison state will not release his body - but he smuggled out life, illicitly created a child he never got to hold, may that inspire us.
Rishi Sunak calling the Hamas attack a "pogrom" says it all: for two thousand years Europe persecuted Jews, then they decided we were convenient imperial props and now they blame ethnically cleansed Arabs for Europe's sins. It's sickening.
As the trade union branch representing Member of Parliament staff in Westminster and throughout Britain, we just passed this motion.
We are calling on MPs to ensure they aren’t complicit in Israel’s crimes. 1/2
@lmharpin
Yes Lee I am the son of a Jewish moneylender - well done. Growing up in the British ruling class taught me a lot about violence and power. And I want every coloniser to fall because that's the only lasting way to end these cycles of violence and death.
First he glorifies the 7/10 massacre. Then he glorifies Houthi attempts to sink civilian shipping? 👇🏽If you are allowing yourself to be led by these nutcases think again. Real socialists stand with the Royal Navy sailors protecting the workers on those vessels
Much of my politics was learned in the encounter between the histories of Jewish oppression and Jewish values I was taught, and the reality of the British ruling class that surrounded me - a world where it was assumed that some people were valuable and others were vermin.
We live in a disorienting age, when everyone sensible and moderate hates racism and anti-racism is mostly about dealing with statues and the legacy of the past, while colonial settlers ethnically cleanse Jerusalem right now as their apartheid state is lauded for its Covid policy.
One thing I learned in Hebrew school about pogroms: they are a state act held at arm's length, radicalising from below a state strategy of scapegoating and division to deflect crises. You don't expect the Tsar to keep you safe with his police, you mobilise in self-defence.
We must now put pressure on any country that hosts Israeli politicians expressing genocidal intent - the ICJ explicitly named Israel's President and Defence Minister - to ensure they are arrested and held accountable, as the Court demanded. Palestinians deserve to live.
It was not a love of violence. It was the hope for a world where people would not be crushed by colonial power but instead claim the right to live in dignity, and where the violent cycles unleashed by that power could at last be ended too.
Keir Starmer's reference to "anti-Zionist antisemitism" as denying me a "self-determination" achieved by ethnically cleansing others, in a speech to a settler Ambassador who believes in racial purity, was not just wrong. It was deeply, deeply racist. Colonial thinking lives.
The JC spent Holocaust Memorial Day secretly recording me, but I'm proud of every word I said and I'm struck once again that Zionists - like anti-Semites - are disgusted by cosmopolitan Jewish identities:
On this view, to stand up for Jews means to align oneself with the powers of the West against the savage hordes, with the coloniser against the colonised; this is a language pioneered to turn Jews into cannon fodder for imperialism (which is what "Israel" is).
After five years of a rolling panic about anti-Semitism, our likely next Prime Minister explains that Jews are good at business and defending us means attacking "woke" anti-racism - surely including the Palestinian freedom struggle. We Jews are cannon fodder to these racists.
Here I am debating John Mann on Channel 4 News, arguing that militant opposition to anti-Semitism can go hand in hand with championing Palestinian freedoms:
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil,
#Germany
committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most
Muslims are as Jews once were to these people - outsiders lurking in their midst, seeking to bring down Western civilisation. That's how the political class hear the call of universal human freedom when it interrupts their attempts to arm a genocide.
This paragraph once again begs the question what journalism really is in our world - who gets to speak and who gets to censor, and who gets treated with respect as people are massacred:
The Jewish left generalise from the experience of millennia of anti-Semitism to insist that nobody should be called a "human animal" ever, by anyone, nor should their homes and hospitals be bombed because their lives matter less. That is what Jewish history teaches us - urgently.
First, they focus on my tweet from the morning of October 7, immediately after seeing Gaza's prison walls breached by the prisoners. I wrote: "Shabbat Shalom and may ever coloniser fall everywhere." What did that mean?
Guess how many times Keir Starmer has spoken to Zarah since she was elected four years ago? Once. She has repeatedly highlighted racism, including bigoted briefings from anonymous Labour Party sources and she, an MP, can barely get a meeting. Their views on Gaza are no surprise.
I just walked past a packed market, jammed with people while the police ban anyone from gathering to pay respects to a woman possibly kidnapped and murdered by one of their colleagues.
One beautiful dynamic of recent weeks has been the emergence of proud Jewish worlds that want nothing to do with colonial violence, and want to reconnect us instead to coalitions with others who know what savagery "Western civilisation" means: I've joined
@BlackJewishA
.
The article also mentions my class background. My parents are Jews who pursued social mobility. They were proud to send me to a fancy English school, hoping always for the acceptance their immigrant ancestors sought. They made lots of choices I would not make.
If this vaccine if effective, there will not be enough for everyone straight away. Not a single dose should go to the queue-jumping rich, buying their way to the front of the line while others suffer and die. That's the socialist demand.
This is how
@AmazonUK
wishes its warehouse workers a Happy New Year - they hand these letters to staff while they work over Christmas, firing them and marked "private" so the rest of us never know
Britain is directly militarily involved in the defence of a state committing genocide - shooting down the attempts by one of the poorest countries in the world, Yemen, to put pressure on Israel to secure humanitarian aid to Gaza. Ģrotesque, maddening, utterly unsurprising.
We face many enemies but in Paris today - as here in north London this week - Melenchon declares that the spirit of the Paris Commune lives. He begins, "arise, oh wretched of the earth..."
Some of us were raised with stories of how our people were once humiliated like this by powers hungry, so hungry, to break people. We must not let them win
I added subtitles to this video because many people seemed to want a translation of the full thing: israeli soldiers taunting women and children as they evacuate and become refugees in the south.
Israel's President just said his state is pummelling Gaza "to save the values of Western civilisation." I think that's right - it's "Western civilisation" vs life and freedom:
I was asked to help him with his Oxford interview, which I did and then he arrived and hung out with the ambitious young Blairites, before working for 2 minutes at the CBI and for Wes Streeting, then parachuted into parliament. Isn't this part of how the "red wall" was lost?
All I remember about Keir Mather is that he was enthusiastically pro-Corbyn in 2015, but ditched him as soon as Corbyn came under heavy fire in 2016. Someone, it seems, who blows with the wind and throws anything under the bus if it may danger their interests, present or future.
They would have said the same to Isaiah, to Amos, even to Moses: to every Jew who watched their people fall into the horrors of the world and called out in the name of our finest traditions - Step back! Side with the dispossessed, work for the day when all are free.
This was one of the most painful things I've ever written, but these are things that have to be said.
We can no longer consider Jews who align themselves with the murderers of Jewish babies part of the Jewish people.
My latest
@Jerusalem_Post
column:
We understand anti-Semitism as one of a series of paranoias through which power denigrates Others, we know it can appear among the discontented too, we want to fight it because we want everyone to live in dignity. Our anger at anti-Semitism and at Zionism come from the same place
Panics about anti-Semitism are again appearing from the liberal and conservative mainstream in Britain and elsewhere, as an explanation for the big wave of support for Palestinian freedom. I hope this is helpful to understand what's going on:
If it talks like a settler colonial project to displace a people, and bombs like a settler colonial project to displace a people, Western media will keep calling it a war of self defence by a normal country facing terrorism - the radicalising question is, "why?"
“A house on the beach is not a dream”: An Israeli real estate company specialising in Jewish settlements in the West Bank is planning for the day after. This is beyond aspirational, their staff is already working on plans.
Most Sunday marchers (ignoring Tommy Robinson etc) will be genuine in their concern about rising anti-Semitism. But they will not beat it by doubling down on a garrison state - it hasn't worked so far. It's time for us, as Jews, to turn back to projects of solidarity.
The whole free world must condemn the American regime in its last days as its ageing leaders (organised into two state "parties") crack down on peaceful protest across the nation: sanctions now!
With deep concern for the suppression of dissent in Bristol, the international community must move quickly to impose appropriate sanctions on the British regime and its crown servants
Hi
@BoardofDeputies
- "the Jewish community" is not a monolith, just as we weren't a monolith when we rejected your advice to stay quietly at home in 1936 and instead confronted Mosley's fascists in the streets and smashed them.
There will come a day when Zionism is seen as a tragic blip in Jewish history, and on that day I will at last pray at the Western Wall - not guarded by soldiers securing the dispossession of others, but next to my Palestinian friends worshipping in mosques and churches, all free.
I think Labour MPs, who spent 5 years saying any decent Labour leader would be storming ahead in the polls, really started to believe that - and only now, as Starmer flops, will they moan that Corbyn had an unfair advantage all along: he believed in something!
Why do racists suddenly care about Jews? They don't, I've argued - we have become a prop for their racism, their protected minority of white society against the savage hordes, a tool for attacking others. That's been the structure of this moral panic, while anti-Semitism rises.
One striking thing about The Zone of Interest is how it presents Nazi settler utopias, the horrifying banality of settler-colonial violence. The Höss family want living space in the East, they want a garden. Elimination of others is a price they pay for a petit-bourgeois dream.
This is what I mean when I say imperialism constructs Jews as protected minorities to turn us into human shields. Zionists organise a sale of Palestinian land in a shul, Palestinians turn up outside to protest their dispossession, and the American President calls them antisemites
"The Palestinian Youth Movement organized the protest to object to a sale of Palestinian land scheduled to take place at the Synagogue... Such sales are illegal under international law."