Language matters, but ideas matter more

Back in 2003, not long after the invasion of Iraq, the Labour MP Tam Dalyell was trying to explain why Tony Blair, then Labour Prime Minister, had dragged the United Kingdom into yet another Middle East war. It must be that he is “unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers”, Dalyell concluded, and he even went as far as naming them: Lord Levy, Peter Mandelson and Jack Straw - only one and three-quarters of whom, at most, are actually Jewish.

Dalyell was roundly condemned for what was obviously an antisemitic remark (although it didn’t harm his political career; nowadays he’d be thrown out of the party for less). Claiming that Jews secretly influence or manipulate political leaders against their better judgement to adopt policies that support some notional Jewish purpose is the bread and butter of antisemitic conspiracism, and everyone recognised it as such.

Well, almost everyone. Dalyell was defended by the left wing journalist Paul Foot, who wrote in The Guardian that “obviously he is wrong to complain about Jewish pressure on Blair and Bush when he means Zionist pressure” - as if this was simply a problem of language, a clumsy word choice that turned an otherwise astute political observation into a piece of anti-Jewish bigotry. Of course that completely misunderstands how antisemitism works. This wasn’t a simple slip of the tongue, the 2003 equivalent of getting someone’s pronouns wrong. Dalyell betrayed a way of thinking in which a policy as serious and consequential as going to war is determined not by the national interest, but by a bunch of conniving Jews secretly pressuring the Prime Minister to do their bidding.

If this is your analysis of how politics works, it doesn’t matter whether your villain of choice is all Jews, some Jews, or one especially cunning and powerful Jew. The underlying thinking is the same, whether you point the finger at Jews, Zionists, the Israel Lobby, Rothschilds, globalists, or any other metonym. It gets applied to Jews, in whatever guise, because antisemitic conspiracy myths have been around for so long, and are so common and familiar, that they seem to make sense in a way that similar conspiracies levelled at other minorities wouldn’t. At the time of the Iraq War the U.S. Secretary of State (Colin Powell) and the U.S. National Security Adviser (Condoleezza Rice) were both African Americans, but nobody suggested that the war was cooked up by a conspiracy of African Americans in high office. It would have seemed absurd; yet the idea that Jews within the U.S. government were pushing for war in Iraq because it served Jewish interests to do so was everywhere.

Twenty years later, it remains the case that for many on the anti-Israel left, as long as you say “Zionist” instead of “Jew” you can make any allegation you want about Zionist money influencing and subverting our politics and remain, in your own mind, free of antisemitism. The latest example of this occurred at a public meeting in Kilburn this week, when the author and Labour Party activist Paul Mason, who was on the panel, challenged an audience member for making what he claimed were antisemitic remarks about Labour leader Keir Starmer:

A transcript of the meeting has since been published, and these are the exact remarks that Mason took issue with:

“I can’t believe that there hasn’t been any mention here of the Labour Files, like you know the way that Jeremy Corbyn was outed and obliterated through the media because of Keir Starmer and his Israeli sponsors and the fact that so many in the Labour Party are supported and funded by Israel. How can anyone even consider voting Labour, they don’t stand for the people. The only hope that we have and why I’m here supporting Emma is because she’s local she would have stood for Labour again but Starmer and his Israeli body didn’t want her standing and that’s been the case as we’ve seen across the country and it means that Labour candidates in the wards aren’t locals known to locals, don’t understand the local situation and the issues that we’ve struggled through.”

I’ve put the antisemitic comments in bold, and it’s easy to understand why Mason took offence. The audience member is not just saying that Starmer and others in Labour have received Israeli funding, but - crucially - that this funding explains their behaviour. This is where the conspiracy element is found: in the idea that Starmer doesn’t make decisions based on his own judgement, but to serve “Israeli sponsors”. It’s in the extraordinary claim that Israel, not the Labour Party, determines who gets to stand as a Labour Party election candidate. And that this nexus of Starmer, Israel and the media even ensured Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat and removal as party leader.

One of the other panellists at that meeting was Emma Dent Coad, the former Labour MP for Kensington, and her defence of these comments betrays exactly this failure to grasp that antisemitism can still be present even if the word “Jew” is missing. Writing in the Morning Star, Dent Coad claimed that the audience member simply “raised the issue of Israel lobby donations to various Labour MPs, including many frontbenchers, and to the party itself, all of which are on public record.” This rather understates the meaning of what was said, but Dent Coad went on to write that the antisemitism training she did with the Jewish Labour Movement taught her that “Conflating the Israeli state with Judaism or with “all Jews” is the precise definition of anti-semitism.”

Unfortunately, Dent Coad appears to be labouring under a gargantuan misunderstanding. She has taken to heart the important point that it is antisemitic to conflate Israel with all Jews, and that Zionism and Judaism are different things; but has then made a fatal error in concluding from this that as long as you use the words “Zionism” and “Israel” rather than “Jews”, you are in the clear.

If only it were that simple. I’m confident that the Jewish Labour Movement’s antisemitism training will also have covered the way that sometimes, antisemitic tropes can be smuggled into anti-Israel discourse by using coded language to convey the same old conspiracy myths. It’s an essential way that antisemitism works today, especially on the left. Perhaps she wasn’t listening at that point in the training.

Dent Coad confirmed her ignorance by writing that the audience member was only being anti-Zionist, and “Following the exoneration of Prof David Miller, anti-zionism is now a protected characteristic.” You have to laugh in horror at this. David Miller has built a career out of blending the language of anti-Zionism with every antisemitic trope in the book. If Dent Coad and others across the anti-Israel left are going to treat Miller’s tribunal win as a green light to endorse his version of antisemitic anti-Zionism, we really are in trouble.