The Roots of Labour’s Anti-Semitism Lie Deep within the Populist Left

But that misses the fact that huge chunks of the egregious anti-Jewish racism spewed out in left circles and on social media has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine: it’s all bankers and Rothschilds, control of the media and Holocaust denial. Of course, sometimes “Zionism” is deployed as a handy codeword, but today’s anti-Jewish racists have often left the Middle East behind. It’s Jews they’re obsessed with.

Which brings us back to populism. For anti-Semitism is populism in perhaps its purest and most distilled form. It says that politics is indeed a battle between the virtuous masses and a nefarious, corrupt elite – and that that elite is “the Jews.” That’s why anti-Semitism carries so many of populism’s distinguishing features, from the fear of an enemy within, to its insistence that the media is bent on distorting reality. Earlier this year a global study by the Guardian found that a distinguishing feature of those with a populist worldview is a willingness to believe conspiracy theories, whether on the climate crisis, vaccines or aliens from outer space. Anti-Semitism is nothing if not an all-encompassing conspiracy theory, suggesting that Jews are the secret rulers of the world.

This gets us closer to that question, of why any anti-Semite would feel Corbyn’s Labour is the party for them, Freedland writes:

It’s tempting to link it with Corbyn’s fierce hostility to Israel, and his long record of not seeing anti-Jewish racism even when it’s right in front of him. But the subtler view is that, under Corbyn, Labour has shifted towards a left populism.

In a fascinating critique from the anti-capitalist left, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts argue that Corbynism’s big move is away from seeing capitalism as a system with its own unalterable dynamics, compelling all within it to operate according to its own logic, to seeing its cruelties instead as the work of malign individuals. “From this perspective,” they write, “capitalist crises, poverty and inequality are wholly avoidable phenomena. They are the result of an immoral minority willfully using the power of money, financial trickery and ideology to undermine – or, indeed, ‘rig’ – a society based on ‘real’ production which would otherwise work to the benefit of all.”

Such a view of capitalism – focusing on individuals, not structures – doesn’t necessarily end in hatred of Jews: you might blame some other “immoral minority”. But this is the problem with talking endlessly of the “many, not the few” (a sinister slogan which I loathed when Tony Blair was using it). Pretty soon, and especially after the 2008 crash, people will ask: who exactly are this few, working so hard to deny the rest of us our utopia? The anti-Semite has a ready answer.

Freedland concludes:

The point is, this is not a problem that can be solved with a few tweaks to Labour’s disciplinary code. This is a political problem, one tied to a strand of left politics and with roots centuries deep. We see it now because that version of leftism currently controls Britain’s main opposition party and because we are living through a new age of populism. Tackling it will require not a change to the rulebook, but a change in the very way Labour’s leaders see the world.

Read the article: Jonathan Freedland, “The Roots of Labour’s Anti-Semitism Lie Deep within the Populist Left,” Guardian (12 July 2019)