Every time it all feels a bit too much – antisemitic comedians, MPs blaming Israel for riots, the constant throbbing drum roll of hate and war, you know the kind of thing – I remember the time I infiltrated a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) meeting and can’t help cracking a bitter smile. It makes me feel better. Because as powerless as we feel, as many conversations we have about whether we have a future in this country, we are still doing better than them.
I’ve been thinking about the SWP because its sister organisation, Stand Up to Racism (nice name, not nice people), managed to get itself back in the news last week when it staged a series of protests against rumoured far-right demos.
The Trotskyist SWP specialises in protests – apparently it even has its own factory to make placards – and is nimble enough to jump on popular feeling about a particular subject, like a spider going in for a kill. It stole the headlines as thousands of good-natured people who wanted to actually stand against racism found themselves holding SWP placards and listening to speeches about the perfidy of Israel and singing "From the River to the Sea”.
That the far-right never showed up – the existence of their plans was a hoax – made no difference. It won that particular war. But nothing sums up the SWP more than when it tried to replicate its success with more anti-racist demonstrations and the only target they seemed to find were some Port Vale fans having a drink at a Wetherspoons who looked on incredulously.
A few months ago, while investigating the proliferation of Palestine flags in the Tower Hamlets, I sneaked into an SWP meeting. I have to admit to having some fears. Would I be spotted as a Zionist and attacked? Would they follow me home or start singing “From the River to the Sea” in my face? Would it be a room filled with seething hatred? A local friend kindly accompanied me; we tied up our Jew fros into buns and put on our most grimy clothes. There, in a church hall, we found a total of eight other people in the room and two of them were the speakers. There was to be a lecture and then a discussion on how the lesson of defeating the apartheid government in South Africa could be applied to Israel and Palestine and be used to create a true, socialist revolution.
The first thing I found was that there was amazement that the British working class hadn’t risen to tell the government that we should not stand with Israel. While many of us in the Jewish community may see unions as infested with anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred, a few in that tiny crowd were apoplectic that union bosses hadn’t called a general strike in favour of Palestine.
There was plenty of sighing about how, once again, the British working classes had let them down. How were they going to enlighten the workers to the cause of the revolution when the workers couldn’t even be bothered to make it to the marches? And, they wondered, why hadn’t the workers of Egypt or Jordan gone on strike for the Palestinians? These countries were acting as if they were allies of Israel and the workers had done nothing for their brother Palestinians, they said, with disgust and amazement and absolutely no knowledge of the geopolitics of the region.
During a break, in which we were meant to talk about our plans to foment this revolution, a sweetly naive chap to my left said how frustrating it was. Even boycotting Israeli goods in supermarkets was hard – there were so many of them. The best he’d managed was putting some Palestine flags on some Jaffa oranges.
The discussion of boycotts went to the room as a whole. It was too tough to boycott Israeli goods, they agreed; Israelis had sneakily made too many medicines and it was impossible to know which ones they were. What if you really need them? I dared not point out that the Apple Mac being used by our speakers should surely have also been on the boycott list too, as the company has spent millions on buying Israeli start-ups. Oops!
Perhaps the most telling part of the discussion was about the marches. We were given a timetable of places where pro-Palestinian leaflets were to be handed out – daily. There was much pride in the fact the flags were still hanging but plenty to discuss when it came to the weekly London pro-Palestine marches – the cause has been at the heart of the SWP’s biggest jamborees for years and now it had gone mainstream.
It was interesting seeing the mirror image of what we as Jews thought we were seeing. For many, the marches were hate-filled and dangerous, a reason to avoid central London on a Saturday for months on end.
But making Jews afraid was literally the only power that those marches had. “All we are doing is marching up and down with our placards, its not making any difference,” said one. All nodded in agreement. Our government was still backing Israel.
As the meeting ended, my friend and I were pounced on. Could we help distribute leaflets? Were we going to the marches? Did we want to buy a copy of Socialist Worker magazine? We made our excuses and left, heartened that, as despairing as we might feel, they were feeling worse.
