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Roole
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Thanks for clarifying. I see where you're coming from.
That is a common definition of Zionist but I don't think it's the only one. That's not overly relevant here, though, because I am using the term broadly in the same sense as you.
To clarify my initial point, I saw 'leftists' on Twitter saying that the (Zionist) British Board of Deputies or Israel itself was responsible for (a) Corbyn's failure and (b) the censorship of the film at Glastonbury. I contend that this is anti-Semitic because it singles out Jews as being behind a conspiracy.
While the BoD and other Zionist Jews may have contributed to the attacks against all things Corbyn, these were merely voices in a chorus and the real chorusmaster was the bourgeois class. As you point out, there are non-Jewish British Zionists who also played a role in fighting Corbyn.
I reached the conclusion that the British left is antisemitic to the extent that it argues the former rather than the latter. It wouldn't necessarily be antisemitic (although it would still be problematic) to lay the blame with the non-Jewish British Zionists that you mention, unless it were implied that these activists were controlled by Israel (meaning Jews) – unfortunately, I did see tweets making that claim or something very close to it.
The antisemitic bit is claiming that all this was orchestrated by the Board of Deputies/Israel. And if that's true, it doesn't matter whether the BoD/Israel are Zionist. It is not absurd to say that blaming only Jews for something that loads of people/religions/groups/tendencies were involved in is antisemitic. It's more or less the definition of antisemitism. And people on the British 'left' were making that argument on Twitter.
If the British working class had class consciousness and a decent political education, it would not allow itself to be caught in this kind of antisemitism and would go to lengths to make sure that it's analysis of e.g. Corbyn were rigorous and not antisemitic.
Yeah, there are cranks who say stupid things, but it's common knowledge at this point that the Corbyn campaign was undone by various levels of sabotage by fellow Labour members and even people within the campaign who went to extensive lengths to misappropriate campaign funds to undermine Corbyn while using baroque levels of targeted advertising against Corbyn and his advisers and even the journalists they follow to cover the tracks of those misappropriations. There were surely Jewish individuals and Jewish organizations involved, and Israel itself was probably involved since Britain is an important ally to it, but Corbyn was mainly undone by white British Zionist opposition.
Part of the issue is that western governments -- the US famously has this issue with AIPAC -- seem to wish to bait antisemitism by allowing Israel to use publicly-visible levers of power usually reserved for domestic corporations and "special interest groups" to control politicians. People see the success of AIPAC and they say "Look! Israel controls so much of US politics that concerns it!" They do not stop for a moment and wonder which other foreign countries are allowed to have a PAC in the US that can so freely buy off politicians. Israel has a lot of money thanks to the endless money funneled to it, but they certainly aren't the richest country in the world. In absolute terms, the richest country is the PRC (due to size, population, etc), and yet we see no American-Chinese Public Affairs Committee PAC, this of course being due to the fact that it is not permitted to have one. Israel is allowed to have one because it is chiefly a western puppet, and so it is quite safe to allow it to use these levers of power to ultimately give money back to its masters to secure their own common interests!