False friends

Yesterday there were two marches in central London, part of the never-ending stream of political demonstrations in our capital city. One, the ‘Uniting the Kingdom’ demonstration, was a far right march called by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (better known as Tommy Robinson). The other was a Stand Up To Racism counter-protest against Robinson and his followers. Both of these movements claim, in their own way, to oppose antisemitism, and both marches were likely to include small numbers of Jewish supporters; neither, in reality, has anything to offer the vast majority of British Jews. One of the factors that has contributed to the year of turmoil and anxiety that the Jewish community has experienced is this rise of street movements of opposing, sometimes extreme, politics, arguing over the fate of things dear to Jews without ever stopping to ask, or care, what most Jews actually think or want.

If Robinson’s previous protests are anything to go by, yesterday’s gathering was likely to attract people with a record of far right activism and football hooliganism. Part of the rationale for the demonstration was to present a more peaceful version of the protests during the summer that quickly morphed into violent, anti-migrant riots, and while yesterday saw nothing like that kind of disorder - there were five arrests across both demonstrations - the racist and Islamophobic politics that drove much of the summer’s violence is still there. One person who wasn’t there yesterday was Robinson himself, who was arrested on Friday under the Terrorism Act and remains in custody, while he is due in court for a different allegation on Monday.

Robinson, best known as the former leader of the English Defence League (EDL) and Britain’s most prominent anti-Muslim agitator on both social media and the streets, claims not to be antisemitic and has literally and metaphorically wrapped himself in the Israeli flag. He has visited Israel in the past and has received some financial support from right wing, pro-Israel sources in north America. Their support for him was spectacularly foolish and ill-judged, given Robinson’s own criminal and extremist record, and Robinson has been consistently condemned by Jewish community leaders in Britain. It may be understandable that some Jews, right now, feel so starved of support from wider society (and especially from the anti-racist left - but more of that later) that they think any one who waves an Israeli flag is an ally. But it would be a mistake.

Robinson started his political career in the British National Party and has never stopped associating with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and antisemites (this thread gives a flavour). He is not averse to a bit of antisemitic mimicry himself, as this video shows, and has in the past dressed up as a fake Rabbi. He said that the EDL adopted a pro-Israel stance to attract funding from Zionists because, of course, Jews mean money. In November 2022, Robinson published a rambling, 8,000 word essay titled “The Jewish Question” to explain his own views about Jews and Zionism - and it was damning.

Combining conspiracy theories about Jewish power, dodgy racial science and a defence of Kanye West, Robinson wrote of “powerful Jewish people, claiming to be Zionists, who have their fingers on buttons of power in the entertainment industry, in big tech, in mainstream media, in the music industry, in Hollywood and in governments.” He has his favoured Jews - ones on the right rather than the left, naturally - but concluded that liberal, secular Jews pose a danger to society and need to change:

“My argument, to conclude, is that Jewish people politically aligned to the left (typically secular, don’t even believe in a God or out and out atheist) are way more of a problem than those politically aligned on the right (traditionalists, God fearing). So, it’s not a case of the problem being a Jewish problem, the problem is too many Jews have abandoned conservatism and religion, and instead embraced “progressivism”… Perhaps we need to change the political landscape and culture of Jews, return the majority to conservatism, to traditional family values, back to God. Then, perhaps the politics of tomorrow will be influenced by a better culture, more in line with humanity, reason and real moral virtue… we need to open up a dialogue about the Jewish question, it’s long overdue.”

The idea that Tommy Robinson gets to judge which version of Jewish identity is acceptable and enforce a change in Jewish culture and politics is perverse; his implication that the majority of Jews represent a toxic influence on humanity and undermine moral virtue is chillingly familiar. The fact there are some Jews who he approves of does not make this any less of an antisemitic viewpoint. Even if some Jewish people are not put off by Robinson’s criminality and the mob behaviour of his followers, they should realise that his professed support for Israel - whether it is genuine or not - acts as an alibi for his own antisemitic views, and for his habitual association with much more openly and explicitly antisemitic people on the far right.

Opposing Robinson’s supporters today will be Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), and on the surface, what can be objectionable about that? Their banner even said they oppose “Racism, Islamophobia and Antisemitism.” Except this is part of the broader movement on the left that includes Zionism in its definition of racism - meaning most British Jews would be seen as racists - and has been parading its own version of antisemitism through the streets since October 7 last year. SUTR is closely linked to, and influenced by, the Socialist Workers’ Party: the same Socialist Workers’ Party whose reaction to the October 7 massacre by Hamas was “Rejoice as Palestinian Resistance Humiliates Racist Israel”. (Some even say SUTR is a full-on SWP front group, although SUTR denies that). The SWP has long been a purveyor of a particular type of far left antisemitism, all the way back to the 1970s when, under its former name of the International Socialists, its activists were involved in trying to ban student Jewish Societies that were Zionist and therefore deemed to be racist.

One of the speakers listed for the SUTR protest was Ben Jamal, Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). For the past year, PSC’s protests have regularly attracted people carrying antisemitic placards invoking the full range of anti-Jewish tropes: conspiracy theories about Zionist control of the media and politics, blood libel slurs, Nazi comparisons, and so on. Alongside the overt antisemitism are chants and slogans for resistance and intifada, and for Palestine “from the river to the sea”, which are more ambiguous, but it would not be unreasonable to interpret as expressions of support for the violent campaign by Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran to eradicate Israel entirely. Some of these antisemitic placards are so extreme that the people carrying them have been arrested and charged with hate crimes.

If you are organising a campaign against the world’s only Jewish state, you should be prepared for the danger that it will attract antisemites, if you genuinely care about standing up to racism. Except they don’t. PSC has never, as far as I am aware, forced antisemites to leave their protests; never banned placards comparing Israel to Nazi Germany; never told supporters of Hamas to stay at home. When I tweeted about this on Friday, Jamal responded by calling it a distraction from what is happening in Gaza. What’s a little bit of antisemitism in Britain, he seemed to be saying, when things in Gaza are so much worse?

The problem with this response is that this is supposed to be an anti-racist movement, and this is racism within their own ranks that is there not despite their cause, but because of it. Their reaction to its presence is the exact opposite of standing up to racism. One of the other speakers billed for yesterday’s demo was Jeremy Corbyn, whose inability (let’s be charitable) to stand up to anti-Jewish racism when he was leader of the Labour Party was so damaging that the party ended up breaking anti-discrimination law - specifically, committing acts of unlawful harassment - in its treatment of Jewish members. The Equality & Human Rights Commission report that made this ruling had an entire chapter titled “A Failure of Leadership” that concluded:

It is hard not to conclude that antisemitism within the Labour Party could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so.

In other words, Corbyn could have stood up to anti-Jewish racism when he was leader of the Labour Party, but elected not to. However, this does not preclude him from speaking at a Stand Up To Racism demonstration, just as Ben Jamal’s passivity in the face of repeated antisemitism on his own PSC marches doesn’t. This is because for this part of the left, anti-Jewish racism is not recognised as a cause worthy of action unless it comes from the far right, and the refusal to recognise or address it within their own world is not seen as a political or moral failing.

Just as Robinson has a handful of Jewish supporters, so there is a Jewish Bloc that marches on the PSC’s anti-Israel protests, and the same Jewish Bloc was on the SUTR demonstration yesterday; but there was no Zionist bloc, and if one had tried to join this supposedly inclusive anti-racist protest, they would not have been welcome. Most Jews won’t go near it, just as they won’t go near Tommy Robinson’s rival protest.

These movements feed off each other. The larger one grows, so does the other; sometimes, as with yesterday, they need each other’s events as a direct trigger for their own activism. They even, at times, share a type of antisemitic conspiracism, which became apparent during the summer riots: while the far right is gripped by the Great Replacement Theory that insists Jews use mass immigration into western societies to weaken and ultimately destroy the white race, the anti-fascist movement that opposed them became fascinated by the idea that the riots themselves were orchestrated by Israel, with Robinson himself a mere patsy of string-pullers in Tel Aviv. (Robinson’s professed support for Israel is probably the only thing he ever says that proponents of that conspiracy theory take at face value, while they ignore the fact that the entire Jewish community leadership in Britain - all of whom are Zionists - have repeatedly rejected and condemned him).

Both conspiracy theories are entirely spurious, and both give the lie to claims by both sides that they oppose antisemitism. But then one other thing that these two movements share, when they talk about antisemitism, Israel, and Jews in general, is a profound lack of interest in what most Jews actually want. They talk to their own Jewish supporters, of course, who reassure them that nothing they say or do is antisemitic, but these are marginal minorities at two ends of the Jewish community spectrum. As for the majority of Jews in the middle - the ones who see Israel’s continued existence as essential and fear for its future, and who also reject racism, bigotry and street hooliganism - they are absent from the thinking and the discourse of either movement.

These are not the only choices for British Jews, although both movements would like us to think that they are. They both offer the seductive promise of a simplistic answer to problems of antisemitism and extremism, while harbouring antisemitism and extremism within their own ranks and showing little understanding of, or interest in, why that is the case. Street protest does sometimes offer a direct solution to an immediate threat - Cable St is the most obvious example, as were protests against the National Front in the 1970s - but street politics rarely turns out well for Jews, compared to the safety net of boring old liberal democracy.