Corbyn part of long history of antisemitism on the left

The story that led to Jeremy Corbyn being suspended from the British Labour Party for antisemitism started back in 2004. It began with a campaign that was gaining traction within the academic trade unions in Britain to exclude Israelis from the global community of science and scholarship.

Or, perhaps it started in 1843, when Karl Marx had to argue against his comrades that equal rights for Jews should not be made conditional on them disavowing their Jewishness.

Or maybe in the 1890s, when August Bebel denounced left-wing movements against Jewish capitalism as the “socialism of fools”.

Was it when English socialists claimed that behind the Boer War were shady Jewish diamond dealers and financiers pulling the strings of the British Empire?

Or did it begin in the years following the Holocaust, when Stalin planned the wholesale deportation of Russian Jews to Siberia on the pretext that Jewish doctors were trying to murder him?

Or perhaps it was when the last remaining Jews were purged from public life in Communist Germany and Poland because of their imputed support for Zionist imperialism?

I could go on, but the point is made that there is an authentically left-wing tradition of antisemitism.

In 2004, we defeated the boycott campaign, but it came back. Year after year, it grew more powerful, and its antisemitic politics were tolerated by tens of thousands of members of our union, most of whom were scholars and scientists.

We fought hard and tenaciously against the antizionists in the union because we feared that if they succeeded in making themselves legitimate there, then the problem would spread throughout the Labour movement, including, in the end, the Labour Party. We fought hard but we lost; and our fears were realised.

I write “antizionism” without a hyphen because, just as antisemites invent the “semites” who they hate, so the “Zionism” which antizionism demonises is a construction of its own imagination. I used to be a sociologist, but I was now thought of by many of my comrades and my colleagues as a Zionist sociologist. This meant not a sociologist at all, but a racist, an admirer of apartheid, and a supporter of imperialism.

In 2006, the popular socialist mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was accused of antisemitism. He denied it, and shot back an aggressive counter accusation of Zionist conspiracy. When Jews claimed they experienced antisemitism on the left, he said, they weren’t just wrong, they were lying. They were really just trying to silence criticism of Israel and to smear the left by mobilising the false accusation of antisemitism as a weapon to bolster their Jewish power.

This was the key mode of antisemitic bullying in my union, and later in the Labour Party, after 2015, when it was led by Corbyn. When Jews spoke out, they were treated as though their true motivation was to harm the left. In this way, Jews in the party were treated as disloyal, as only pretending to be part of the left.

The democratic state seeks to mediate the interests and the desires of the complex diversity of its citizens. But populism constructs the image of a single, united, authentic “people”, whose interests are articulated by one strong man leader. The leader says that the “enemies of the people” are a globalist liberal elite, the educated, who live in the big cities, people who pretend to be fair and just but who really are only out for themselves.

The antisemitic notion of “the Jew” is perfectly evolved as a way of picturing the enemy, of feeling the visceral dread of the enemy’s power and its venal cunning. The Corbyn left was able to participate in this populist antisemitism by imagining the enemy as Zionism, but always with the caveat that they also relied on the image of good Jews who love Corbyn and hate Zionists.

Boris Johnson’s right-wing Brexit populism offered foreigners as the “enemy of the people”. The European Union was stealing our freedom, he said, in league with the disloyal liberal metropolitan elite in London and its “political class”, and it was bringing foreigners into Britain to adulterate our nostalgically mis-remembered authentic culture, and to bring down wages. The British electorate preferred even that nonsense to Corbyn’s Stalinist contempt for democracy, his antisemitism, and his toadying admiration for anybody who abused human rights around the world in the name of anti-imperialism.

During Corbyn’s leadership there was an unprecedented consensus in the UK Jewish community around the issue of Corbyn’s antisemitism. The Jewish journalists articulated, the scholars offered evidence and analysis, the institutions of the community spoke out, liberal and Orthodox rabbis spoke as one, the Jewish papers shared the same front page.

This week, the statutory body, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), finally delivered its quasi-judicial verdict in the form of a report on Labour antisemitism. The Labour Party had unlawfully harassed its Jewish members, it said.

It specified the antisemitic conduct as “suggesting that complaints of antisemitism are fake or smears”. It’s not antisemitic to say that somebody who says they experience antisemitism may have got it wrong, but it is antisemitic to treat people who say that as though they were part of a dishonest conspiracy to lie, to smear the “Dear Leader”, or to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.

Corbyn responded to this by doing precisely what the EHRC had newly designated as antisemitic harassment of Jews. He wrote, “The scale of the problem was … dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside of the party.”

Corbyn’s claim was that they were lying, that they hated him because he sided with the Palestinians and he opposed capitalism. But of course they didn’t invent the antisemitism because they hated him, they hated him because the antisemitism was real.

• Dr David Hirsh is a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He did his PhD on crimes against humanity and international law. He has written extensively on antisemitism in the left. His most recent book, published in September 2017, was titled “Contemporary Left Antisemitism”.