Re: Long suspended Labour activist Jackie Walker will NOT face any antisemitism charges... Archived Message
Posted by johnlilburne on March 26, 2019, 6:31 pm, in reply to "Re: Long suspended Labour activist Jackie Walker will NOT face any antisemitism charges..."
The Jewish Labour Movement, which is affiliated to the Labour Party, is even more problematic. It claims to represent Jews within the Labour Party, but effectively excludes non Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, a form of discrimination. Anthony Lerman explains: As for self-identifying Jews, the organization designated as fulfilling a similar function is the Party-affiliated Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), until 2004 known as Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion), which claims a membership of 3,000. It’s recognized as a socialist society and you do not need to be Jewish to be a member. Naturally, you do need to share JLM’s aims, which are to ‘maintain and promote Labour or Socialist Zionism as the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people within the state of Israel’, and its belief in ‘the centrality of Israel in Jewish life’. But this leaves Jews in an anomalous position. On the one hand it demonstrates that Jews face no discrimination if they wish to assert publicly, within the Party, the importance of the link between their Jewish identity and their socialist principles. On the other hand, membership is not an option for anyone, Jews included, with a different view of Zionism or Israel. So, while JLM claims to speak for all Jews in the Labour Party, and to be treated as such by Labour, given that a significant proportion of Jewish members are not Zionists or are anti-Zionists, JLM’s claim is simply incorrect. This does constitute a kind-of de facto discrimination: discrimination in favour of Zionist Jews; discrimination against non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews – a situation all the more strange, however, given that a sizeable proportion of Party members, I suspect, would hold similar views. And it’s Jews of a Zionist persuasion who are accusing the Party of institutional antisemitism. The privileging of Zionism has deep historical roots in the Party. JLM’s predecessor, Poalei Zion, affiliated to the Party back in 1903, a time when a very positive view of Zionism, then only of minority interest among Jews, prevailed in the labour movement. So today, the Party acquiesces to the fact that, as far as I can ascertain, no other affiliated society makes membership dependent on the individual expressing support for the official, nationalist ideology of another state. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/the-labour-party-institutional-antisemitism-and-irresponsible-politics/
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