This piece is mostly aimed at those unfamiliar with my writing, much of what follows has been published elsewhere.
What is race?
It’s a political theory concocted in the 17th Century as a retrospective justification for the wars of empire and the transatlantic slave trade. The landed aristocracy had bought off a bourgeois revolution by allowing the merchant classes to expand into the colonies, but the labour crisis that had beset mediaeval Europe was being repeated in the New World, as African, European and indigenous captives found common cause and revolted. The enlightenment dawned, science was ascendant and the hegemony of the Christian church waned, a lot of this science came from the Islamic world.
Some North-Western European philosophers, wishing to establish the superiority of NW European culture, invented the ‘white race’ and by extrapolation, postulated a hierarchy of races, graded according to the moral and intellectual values of NW Europe. Race theory drew on historic antisemitism, with its blood libels and moral panics. The fear of the ‘other’, the ‘infidel’, especially the nomadic ‘rootless cosmopolitans*’ (Gypsies and Jews) who owed allegiance to neither church nor state; all these ideas can still be found in the babblings of modern politicians.
* Antisemitic slur from Tzarist Russia, revived by Stalin in 1948.
Race relies on the logical fallacy of essentialism, whereby people are categorised according to one characteristic, then supposed to possess other traits common to that group. These are not objective categories, and there is no scientific means of differentiating them, nevertheless humans, who like to flock, are as likely to identify themselves with one as to be seen that way by others. In fact, they may be compelled to band together for self-defence. ‘Biological race’ was explicitly disclaimed by the UNESCO declaration “The Race Question” in 1950.
What is racism?
Racism is anything that materially or socially disadvantages members of a racialised group, or makes it more likely they will be targets for violence and oppressive behaviour. It’s a methodology for maintaining a power relation so it only works where such a relation exists. Working Class people may be seduced by it but keep in mind the concept of race was imposed on them by their rulers.
The ruling class no longer needs racism – let alone antisemitism – to exploit us, but it helps them by blunting Class-consciousness, and allows them to commodify identity, so the concept of race is woven into their cultural hegemony. The bourgeois state expects and requires its proxies, having internalised the prejudices on which it was founded, to continue to apply them when acting under its authority, but when they are caught out, will disown them. It preserves essentialist categories as objective ones by labelling this or that prejudice as ‘hate’ and legislating around them. It would have us believe that such prejudice is innate and only its wise intervention keeps us from killing each other. As long as it does so it can enact racist policies and court racist sentiments. Meaningless phrases like ‘mixed race’, ‘white working class’ or even ‘racially diverse’ help maintain the illusion. In focussing on individual ‘racists’ rather than structural racism it allows these to claim a countercultural or rebellious cachet.
I’m dismayed by the increase in antisemitic activity in the West. The blame must lie with the perpetrators, but, like fascism in general, it did not arise in a vacuum. Antisemitic oppression falls on Working Class Jews who don’t have the protection of the state of Israel or the U.S. government; it doesn’t fall on Netanyahu and co. They are part of the hegemonic group, It has been said that antisemitism is a ‘light sleeper’; it is after all deeply ingrained in the culture of North-Western Europe and in the Islamic world also.
What is antisemitism?
Anti-Jewish oppression. The term was coined by German antisemites in the 19th Century, because they thought it sounded more sophisticated than ‘Jew hater’ (Judenhasser). It is arguably the original form and blueprint of racism, it was present in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome and probably grew out of simple ethnic rivalry, becoming ideological with the Romans’ enforced Christian conversion then co-opted into the biological race idea during the ‘enlightenment’. The concept of ‘racial purity’ dates from the 19th Century.
Antisemitism presents Jews as an objective category, sharing a common ‘bloodline’ (whether or not this is true is irrelevant) having sinister common interest. Much of that comes from the “Protoculs of the Elders of Zion” a hoax document from Tzarist Russia. An early example of the ‘conspiracy theory’ it remains an obsession of many on the right, and flourishes on the internet. Self-identified Jews are of many ethnicities, languages, religious and cultural traditions, but share the experience of being racialised by wider society. Practices that disadvantage Jews have been enshrined in legislation, at many times in many places.
In mediaeval Europe, under religious governance, Jewish communities could be accommodated in prescribed areas or expelled, at the rulers’ convenience. Many occupations were reserved for Christians, forcing Jews into unpopular tasks like tax and debt collecting, and crucially moneylending, which although forbidden by the Church, became increasingly important as the money economy established itself. So they were used as a buffer zone for the ruling class, sometimes literally by siting their ghettos on a hostile border.
They were allowed to accumulate a little wealth from commerce, which could easily be expropriated when times were hard, they made convenient scapegoats, were regularly massacred or displaced. In the initial, proletarian phase of the French Revolution the emancipation of Jews was proclaimed, alongside enslaved Africans, both were soon reversed. The treatment of Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust by the West was despicable, the Royal Navy stopped bucket ships crammed with survivors of the camps and incarcerated them behind barbed wire in Cyprus. You want to keep in mind that Churchill had been an antisemite when Hitler was still in short trousers, and so was post-war foreign secretary Ernest Bevin.
Over the centuries, Jews have been blamed for famine, war, witchcraft, natural disasters, the Black Death, capitalism, Bolshevism and financial ruin – a lot of baggage to carry. In my youth on the South coast of England “Jewish” was used as a general-purpose pejorative, alongside “Gypsy”, “Irish” and “Gay”.
With the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the ruling class buffer zone was now sited in the middle East, pitted against secular Arab nationalism, and latterly Islamism. Jews continued to be held up as scapegoats, this time for the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. Jewish interests ceased to be a cause for radicals as the side of Israel was taken by the American Christian right and their fellow-travellers. These people are actual white supremacists that care less for the wellbeing of Jews than did the burghers of mediaeval Europe. They supported the axis politically and logistically against the Spanish people and would have had us on the other side in WW2; they are anti-Working Class and still fear antifascism as a (Jewish) conspiracy. They like to conflate anti-capitalism, or indeed any critique of the preposterous international finance system, with antisemitism.
I’ve always admired Working Class Jewish culture – the familiar ironic sense of humour, stoicism giving way to ferocious resistance against totalitarianism whenever shit came to shovel. Jews formed the backbone of the 19th Century Workers’ movement in London, Russia, New York and Chicago. They fought for the eight hour day, the February Revolution, the Makhnovtchina and the Kronstadt rebellion. Working Class Jews kicked the fascists off Britain’s streets many times before and after WW2, against the law and significantly, their self-styled ‘community leaders’. As a result Britain was one of the few countries in Europe where fascists never gained the executive and murdered or imprisoned a significant part of the population. For more detail on this see “The Authority of the Boot-Maker”. Even within their own community Anarchist and Socialist Jews were subject to authoritarian persecution, and held ‘Yom Kippur balls’ in defiance of this religious autocracy. This was echoed in recent years by the Board of Deputies of British Jews – a deeply reactionary bourgeois clique – in its vilification of Jewdas, when they threatened its campaign to libel Jeremy Corbyn.
The roll of Jewish heroes is too long for this article, but my personal list would have to include: Aaron and Fanya Baron, Josif Gotman, Voline, Ida Mett, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Sholem Schwarzbard, Fanya Kaplan (Roytblat), Isaac Rubin, Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus, Leah Feldman, Joe Jacobs, Ubby Cowan and Barney Becow, Lou Kenton, Reg Weston, Nat Masters and Sam Cohen, Abe Bluestein, Bert Levy, George Nathan and Milton Wolff, Albert Meltzer, Alec Carson, Gerry Flamberg, Len Sherman and Morris Beckman, Abbie Hoffmann Fredy Perlman and April Rosenblum – Netanyahu’s desperate agenda cannot taint their noble legacy.
The modern state of Israel is far removed from the vision of those who originally postulated a ‘Jewish homeland’. Zionism spanned the whole 20th Century political spectrum including utopian socialists, religious groups and of course the ultra-nationalist far-right faction that eventually took it over, using religion more or less as a prop. Many of the most orthodox Jews would have nothing to do with it.
Israel’s 2024 Gaza massacre like everything else these days has been described as ‘unprecedented’ – not at all. It actually sits somewhere between the assault on Malaga by German, Italian and Nationalist armed forces during the Spanish Civil War, and the systematic extermination and displacement of Ottoman Christians by their government during WW1. The first event accounted for approximately forty thousand lives; whilst the second, at a little over a million, originated the word and legal concept of genocide. It’s inarguable that the Christians were killed for their ethnicity and we may call this racism. They were of Armenian, Assyrian and Greek heritage, and their loyalty to the Ottoman state was doubted. It feared that they would side with the allied powers in the event of invasion. Their existence stood in the way of a modern regional power unified under a single religion. Unprecedented my arse!
Of course, the death count is still rising and the ball is very much in the court of the Israeli Defence Force, whose retaliations usually aim for a sixty to one kill ratio, the institutions of liberal democracy having so far proved impotent to prevent the slaughter of thirty thousand civilians. If all those people had been Hamas terrorists Israel would be but a memory by now. The Israeli state has tacit approval to do as it sees fit – being the last outpost of Western colonialism in the region, it’s “too big to fail”. And yet it has failed; failed to occupy the moral high ground it has always claimed, failed to silence its many critics at home and abroad, failed even to stop its enemies firing rockets into its airspace.
Its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent years fending off allegations of graft and corruption, tinkering with the independence of the judiciary to keep himself out of prison, flaunts his vicarious victimhood, protesting his “outrage” that his military-industrial kleptocracy be called to account under international law like anyone else, in the process setting up a thousand years of antisemitism to fall on the shoulders of Working Class Jews as yet unborn. Its military spokesman, Mark Regev believes any surviving Palestinians will not be radicalised by the annihilation of their entire families provided Hamas is defeated and we wonder what planet he’s from.
A ‘conspiracy theory’ has it that the I.D.F. permitted the incursion by Hamas to justify a planned invasion of Gaza. Numerous mainstream media outlets reported that I.D.F. officers had for a year ignored reports by their own spotters of military build-up across the border, and that some personnel had been threatened with disciplinary action to shut up about it. Disciplinary action was also taken by the authoritarian leader of the British Labour party against those who repeated the idea. To the impartial observer, these comments seem entirely plausible. The abject desperation of British politicians labelling anyone who accuses the Israeli government of mendacity or bad faith as antisemitic seriously devalues the concept, at a time when real antisemitism is enjoying a new lease of life.
This is the “performative anti-racism” I refer to in the title. Let’s reduce it to the absurd: we know that all politicians lie, it goes with the job, and that governments reserve the right to break their own rules. Anyone who cannot suspend disbelief to the extent of believing that one government, whose economy is heavily dependant on the arms industry, led by a fraudster with no regard for human life, never misrepresents itself, is a racist.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a body with which I have no personal axe to grind, published a ‘working definition’ of antisemitism in 2016. You can read it here: Most of it is uncontroversial common sense, but of its eleven examples of antisemitic conduct, seven explicitly refer to the state of Israel:
5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.
8. Applying double standards by requiring of it behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
Number 5. I would agree, is the province of fascists and cranks.
Number 6. would have to treat ‘Jewish citizens’ – of wherever – as a collective to make any sense. It is entirely plausible that an individual Jewish citizen might feel that way, as some Marxists in the West once professed loyalty to the U.S.S.R. for example. Is it forbidden then, to mention it? Obviously I don’t believe in ‘national interest’ so the question would be meaningless to me.
Number 7. is where we part company. Some Jews have become “the Jewish people”, how did that happen? Self determination can only be practiced by autonomous individuals, otherwise they are being led. Who is leading them and why?
Religion is a species of ideology, and ideology is an excuse for doing what you like and/or a palliative for those you’re doing it to. Worse, it’s a cross-class alliance. Caution should be exercised over cultural identity for the same reason; both these things often have implicit hierarchies embedded within them.
I would say the state of Israel is a racist endeavour, so is the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Russian Federation. Almost all states were founded on racism; they began with a cultural majority carving out a piece of territory, imposing their language and customs and excluding outsiders; they invaded and robbed their neighbours. That is the context in which the state of Israel was founded.
Nevertheless, for the I.H.R.A., the “State of Israel” represents “the Jewish people”, their rights and aspirations to self-determination – is that even theoretically possible? States are also cross-class alliances; they don’t represent any people, just a mode of production. Its government will not countenance a Palestinian state as that would “reward terrorism” – which is how they got their state in the first place. Where is the clamour for Palestinian self-determination?
Number 8. If only! It has never been held to a minimum standard of behaviour. It flouts UN resolutions with impunity; its right to self defence is undisputed by its allies, who can only beg it to spare civilians, and its spokesmen’s pronouncements must be taken at face value – even when they explicitly prioritise their own casualties. The spectacle of these hypocrites bleating about the loss of twenty of their combatants, killed in the process of slaughtering over twelve thousand children, was almost too much to bear. I repeat that the actions of 7th October were war crimes, multiple breaches of the Geneva Convention, the desperate acts of people bred in a concentration camp, maddened by aerial bombardment, with nowhere to go. If Hamas represented a state recognised by other states, it would be granted belligerent rights and many such breaches would be overlooked, as in the case of the I.D.F. whose operation to rescue two hostages killed seventy-two innocent bystanders.
Number 9. is fair enough, but even here, it is Israel that must be protected from these myths, not actual Jews.
Number 10. It’s possible to “draw comparisons” between a contemporary politician and a potato, without maligning either. Now I compared the assault on Gaza to that on Malaga, if you find that inappropriate, please get in touch and explain why – but make sure of your facts first – I don’t suffer fools gladly.
Number 11. Of course not! But that contradicts number 7. On the one hand Israel represents all Jews, from Jewdas to the ultra-religious, the bourgeois and the neo-fascist; on the other, it’s nothing to do with them. The state of Israel must not be treated differently from any other – except when it demands special treatment.
So the whole thing is self-defeating. Antisemites regard ‘the Jews’ as a collective with a common interest, so do the performative anti-racists, but for all other purposes they are not. Antisemitism is perpetuated in the modern world by the self-appointed ‘leadership’ of the Diaspora, who would have nothing to do if people stopped being antisemitic. This is a burden that no other Diaspora has to carry. If Working Class Gentiles are drawn away from class struggle into active antisemitism we are all the losers, but it will cost Israel and its apologists nothing. Antisemitism could not prevent Jewish and Irish communities collaborating during the Great Unrest, at Cable Street or in Spain – and neither could the Board of Deputies.
The I.H.R.A., considers my views antisemitic, never mind. I’m an anarchist, which means in any situation I do my own research, consult those with special experience, apply my own reasoning and judgement, then draw my own conclusions.
It is my sincere belief that the one thing standing in the way of freedom for Jews and Palestinians alike is the State of Israel. In practice, nobody represents anyone but themselves, communities do not need states or leaders, and many Jewish people agree. The experiment has failed. Jews will be free when everyone else is free, when identities don’t have to compete on the market, when we’ve done away with capitalism and the toxic state idea.
Wessex Solidarity 