Melanie Phillips: An odious political symmetry
We are being led to believe that a fearful political symmetry is developing which has to be avoided at all costs, exemplified by the seven MPs who resigned the Labour whip on Monday.Jews Must Not Embrace Powerlessness
The seven MPs – Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes, Gavin Shuker, and Ann Coffey — said they were resigning the Labour whip to sit as independent MPs in protest at two issues: that the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is facilitating Brexit rather than pressing for the second referendum that they want to see take place; and that he has failed to tackle the antisemitism displayed by hundreds of Labour members.
The latter is undeniably true. Luciana Berger, the Jewish MP who has endured sustained abuse and threats from both inside and outside her Liverpool Wavertree constituency with death threats and taunts of “filthy Jew bitch” and “a Zionist extremist who hates civilised people”, said the party was “institutionally antisemitic”.
As if to prove the point, the very next day Labour MP Ruth George astoundingly suggested that the seven MPs – most of who aren’t even Jews – were in the pay of the State of Israel. After an outcry, George deleted her comment and apologised, saying she had “no intention of invoking a conspiracy theory”.
But she did. You can’t just apologise such jaw-dropping antisemitism away.
That Labour is now institutionally not merely vilely antisemitic but extremist and tyrannical, having been captured by the hard left who pose a danger to the entire country if the party were ever to be elected to government, is demonstrably the case.
But astonishingly, an attempt is being made to draw a parallel with the Conservative party. Just as Labour has been captured by extremists, goes the argument, so too have the Tories from the other side of the political spectrum.
To many observers, Israel’s military strength, thriving First World economy, and democratic institutions seem to mark it as a conventional Western power—albeit one located in the Middle East. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Zionism that gave birth to Israel was a radical and revolutionary movement not only to return the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland, but to eradicate the narrative of victimhood that had come to define the Jews of the Diaspora after centuries of oppression and second-class citizenship. That is why Israel is one of the greatest progressive success stories of modern times.In 2016 Bernie Sanders pushed the Democrats on Israel. Is he now mainstream?
Thus, it makes sense that many left-leaning pro-Israel activists are making valiant efforts to create a space for Zionist groups within the American social-justice movement. On the surface, the fit is an obvious one. Formerly disempowered Jews, who had been oppressed for thousands of years and had lost millions to the Holocaust, now have agency. No longer at the whim of tyrannical regimes, Israel is a powerful, if small, nation-state where the Jews can finally exercise the same rights and privileges as all other peoples.
Yet, as these well-intentioned pro-Israel groups are discovering, intersectionality—the new framework for social-justice movements and the religion of the progressive left—is inherently irreconcilable with Zionism. Pro-Israel groups will fail in their attempts at inclusion precisely because Israel did not fail in its efforts to reverse the condition of the Jew in history. Within the social-justice movement, there is no place for an ideology or an identity that is premised on the idea that Jews will no longer be victims.
In a recent article in the New York Times, columnist Michele Alexander suggested that the only reason Martin Luther King Jr. had been supportive of a homeland for Jews in his day was that “he recognized European Jewry as a persecuted, oppressed, and homeless people.” King would never, she argued, support Israel today.
This may be hard to remember, but three years ago it was a big deal when Bernie Sanders criticized Israel in public.
During a debate in New York City with Hillary Clinton, Sanders generated headlines when he said the United States should care about Palestinian rights. Sometimes, he added, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong.
“In the long run, if we are ever going to bring peace to that region, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” the longtime Vermont senator said at the April 14 Democratic presidential primary debate. “There comes a time when we pursue justice and peace that we will have to say Netanyahu is not right all the time.”
During the campaign, Sanders also described himself as “100 percent pro-Israel.” He spoke about living on an Israeli kibbutz when he was younger and defended Israel’s right to self-defense. But he also broke norms on Israel.
Sanders was the only major candidate not to speak at the annual convention of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby (he offered to appear on video, but AIPAC said its doesn’t do that). For a hot second, his director of Jewish outreach was a co-founder of IfNotNow, a millennial Jewish group that is deeply critical of Israeli actions (and takes no “unified stance” on Zionism, the boycott Israel movement or the “question of statehood”). He said Israel’s actions were “disproportionate” during the 2014 Gaza war and overstated the number of Palestinians who were killed.