A Place and Name: the Left is Failing the Jewish People Again

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Centre, is beautiful. It is the first thing you notice about it. It is built on the slopes of Mount Herzl (the Mount of Remembrance) to the west of Jerusalem. It is next to Jerusalem forest, surrounded by beautiful, Biblical trees, and a strange kind of light brown soil, the very clay out of which man was made (if you so believe). On the entrance an inscription from the Book of Ezekiel (37:14) reads: ‘I will put My breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil’. Soon you are presented with another prophetic verse, this time from the Book of Isaiah, from which the name Yad Vashem is taken:

‘Even unto them will I give in my house and within my walls a place and a name [Yad Vashem] better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off’ (Isaiah 56:5).
 
You do not have to be Jewish, nor have any connection to nor affinity for Israel to find those words touching and poignant. I was brought to tears by them. Every European should feel a deep historical connection to the Holocaust. It is the dark heart of the civilisation we grew up in. Yad Vashem is painfully sad, beautiful, and appropriate in equal measure. It has a powerful biblical aura, its staff a sense of conviction, and its visitors are often brought to the point of emotional collapse by the sheer scale of the atrocities it memorialises. Every human being should go. It really does press home the importance of a people, whatever their connection, having a right to a place and name. A safe space in the true meaning of the word, if you will. 
Yad Vashem is in two parts. The first is a history museum, going through the harrowing story of how European anti-Semitism escalated into the Holocaust, the most horrific event in a century of unimaginable destruction. The second part comprises a series of emotionally devastating monuments to the dead. It is a testament to the moral recovery of post-war Europe (not least modern Germany) that this terrible event feels a lot longer ago than the three generations that separate us from it. The horror of the Holocaust is not lessened by the text book feel of the history museum. The sheer scale, number and material of the destruction creates the devastating impression it should. You go through chronologically, litany after litany of human horror. Carried out by people like us, with our sensibilities, our cultural products and artefacts, drinking at our cafés, expressing our opinions. Eventually the history stops and you come to a room full of files and photographs, millions of them stacked up so high you stand in the middle of a viewing gallery and only see part. Each one a binder with information for each victim accounted for. That doesn’t shock you, though; it’s not the binders that upset you, it’s the empty spaces — all the unaccounted for. From here you go to a small chamber where quotations from various testimonies, fictional treatments, biographies, and historical accounts, are played on a screen. Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Anne Frank. Finally, you are done, and you see a ramp leading to what looks like windows, through which you can see the sky. You go up that ramp and you realise that they aren’t windows but large doors opening up onto another viewing gallery, outside this time. From this balcony you don’t see binders full of names of people slaughtered in service of an ideology of terror and prejudice, nor empty spaces where researchers couldn’t find names, but the Holy Land, stretching out before you. You get it. You really, really get it. They will have a place and a name, that shall not be cut off. Israel itself is that Yad Vashem. These people died in Europe, or they weren’t accepted when they could flee, no one would take them, but they have a place here. And who were they? People held together by a loose web of identity connecting them to a holy land they were exiled from, whose holy texts mourn that forced departure. Where else could they go? This is why Israel exists.

Now that does not excuse the occupation of Palestine. My support for Israel’s existence does not lead me to approve of Netanyahu’s excuses in the name of ‘self-defence’. It is not good enough for our fellow social democrats of the Israeli Labour Party, and it is not good enough for me. But I cannot say the same of this woman we have recently re-admitted to our party. She revels in the idea that ISIS could destroy Israel. She goes far beyond legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and chooses to attack the very structure of the state itself, holding all people responsible. Although they do not share her aggression (nor, I hope, overt anti-Semitism), it relies on the same logic as the BDS movement. They target the Israeli people. For people like Ms Kirby the Israeli people are culpable. The taxpayers whose money went to building Yad Vashem. The members of the Israeli Labour Party pushing for a two state solution. Shopkeepers and doctors. Anyone who votes for Netanyahu out of fear. Academics who try to provide balanced accounts which, let’s face it, draw more informed conclusions than people like Ms Kirby ever could. Those Israelis like the wonderful author David Grossman who has tried to instil sensibility and humanity into the debates. Ordinary soldiers and policemen. Students. Children. All of them cast into the role of aggressive neo-“Nazis”. Leaving aside the painful implications of that label (and she knows precisely what she is doing in using it), it is nonsense. Akin to blaming every German for Hitler. Akin to blaming yourself for the British Empire. It is pure insanity designed to entrench people because…what? You want your part in a holy war? You know nothing about this. You don’t understand and you don’t want to.

There are plenty of states around the world who deserve her criticism. But, as always, she chooses to concentrate all of the world’s evil in the hands of the small Jewish state. This is an old obsession. My PhD thesis was on Ezra Pound, the fascist and anti-Semitic (yes, he was) poet who propagandised on behalf of Mussolini’s regime and expressed support for Hitler numerous times (yes, he did). He often wrote of Jewish lobbies controlling governments and the banks, of exploiting the poverty of ordinary people for their own ends, of using world capitalism to enslave non-Jewish people, and he even wrote of the Rothschild’s undue political influence. We’ve seen all this recently. But, as Alan Johnson writes in ‘The Left and the Jews: Time for a Rethink’, ‘that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is’. I see all this crap regularly, but through the medium of anti-“Zionism” rather than “Judaism”. But I don’t just see it on the far right. It is as much a leftist disease. For the last ten years it has crept, slowly, into acceptable discourse, into our universities. But the Labour Party remained immune until Corbyn won. And now we have daily reports of anti-Semitism in a party which has always fought for universal human rights. The new anti-Semitism is becoming monopolised by the discourses of the left. It is a vicious disease and one that my party is taking too lightly.

We often read discussions about Labour and anti-Semitism accompanied by the graceful note that ‘Corbyn himself is not anti-Semitic’, but I think it is time that we investigate that fully. He probably isn’t — but I don’t know that he isn’t. And we should know that the leader of the Labour Party isn’t. It shouldn’t even be a discussion. The signs are bad. Why are anti-Semites and the more bloodthirsty anti-“Zionists” so attracted to a party that he leads? Why has he called Hamas and Hezbollah friends? Before we accepted that this was just poor word choice. However, in light of the sheer amount of anti-Semitism coursing through the veins of the Labour Party, I think we need to revisit the assessment of that. Hamas and Hezbollah are not the Palestinian people, they are not out for a peace process and never will be. They do not represent the Palestinians I met in Bethlehem, who, by the way, while full of hatred for Israel, were very keen to make clear Hamas do not act for them. Yet Corbyn shares platforms with their admirers, his leadership has seen the re-admittance of their fans, and we have seen Oxford University Labour (whose emails I still receive) riddled with anti-Semitic abuse we expect to find in the pages of 1930s history books. Less seriously but equally embarrassingly we have all heard Ken Livingstone make appalling and moronic remarks time after time. It is not too much to ask, I think, that Corbyn takes a long hard look at himself and his associations and what they mean. He has acted without responsibility or consequence for so long, but he is the leader of the Labour Party now. The consequences that his associations have had should make him realise that his acquaintances and friends are conduits of disgusting ideologies that prop up deep-seated racism. If he cannot notice that, quite frankly, he is either too wilfully ignorant or too stupid to lead a major political party.

In February, I visited Paris’s historic Le Marais district. There are many Jewish establishments in Le Marais, including restaurants, synagogues and museums. What struck me most was the number of soldiers in the area compared with the rest of Paris (which, if you’ve been recently, you’ll know is saying something), and how necessary this was in the wake of the January 2015 terrorist attacks (not to mention the 1982 terrorist attack on a Jewish restaurant in Le Marais itself). Once again, in the heart of Europe, Jewish people are under threat of violence.

One far leftist said to me a few years back ‘Muslims today are the Jews of the 1930s’, which strikes me now as an even more hateful comment to make than it did at the time. In its virtue signalling pomposity, its disregard of history, and its latent Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, it is representative of so much we see today. The speaker is probably a Labour Party member now. And he’s totally wrong: the Jews of today are the Jews of today (just as Muslim people deserve anti-Islamic sentiments to be fought and treated on their own, focussed terms). And those who by fortune and heroism survived from the 1930s would be astonished to see historical contingency cut off so brutally. We have to face up to something that the far left never has. Yes, the left, more so than the liberal centre, has been excellent in spotting and rooting out latent racist attitudes around the world and at home. It sets a low bar even for cultural appropriation and calls out any act of racial stereotyping, as it should. But not with anti-Semitism. Why? Corbyn denounces any form of racism but is slow and non-committal with anti-Semitism. Why? The left sets the bar so high with anti-Semitism. Why? Then, when it is uncovered, it practices a particular kind of blindness, falling back onto the absoluteness of an ill-infomed anti-Zionism. Why? There is one group that the European left has always failed, fails still, and will fail again: the Jewish people. Why?

We should be supporting the Jewish people, unequivocally, for both historical and moral reasons. This does not entail cheerleading for Netanyahu’s oppression, but it does require two things that can be given so easily: the first is that Jewish people can feel safe and at home in a European social democratic party, without fear of ill-informed prejudice, abuse or calls for the destruction of their relatives. The second is Israel’s right to exist, as a Yad Vashem, because expecting all of the Jewish people to feel welcome on a continent that endangers them and their culture to this day is a left-wing fantasy beyond even the wildest dreams of people who think Corbyn will be elected.