Livingstone, Labour and antisemitism

Why not start the suspension from 2004, when the Mayor of London hosted, at City Hall, Yusuf Qaradawi, a cleric who thinks that Hitler "put the Jews in their place"?  Why not start the suspension from 2005, when Livingstone persistently accused a Jewish reporter of being "like a German war criminal"?

Why was Livingstone’s two year suspension not started when he presented programmes for the Iranian state propaganda channel Press TV?  Or from when he said that Jews were rich and so were not likely to vote Labour anyway.

There is a debate to be had about how hostility to Israel, antizionism and boycotting Israel relate to antisemitism. Livingstone is part of this politics of Israel hatred; he is part of the milieu which sees Israel as a key and unique evil on the planet and as a keystone of global imperialism. But Livingstone is one of those figures who cannot resist taking it to another level. He is often tempted to focus his critique on Jews; he is especially attracted to accusing Jews of being like Nazis.

Livingstone has spent half a century trying to cultivate the view amongst the general public that Zionism and Nazism are somehow similar and that they were in cahoots against the ordinary innocent Jews. Of course this is not true.  Hitler was clear in Mein Kampf in 1924 that the Jews did not want a state "so as to live in it"; they wanted one, said Hitler, to "establish a central organisation for their international swindling and cheating".

Livingstone has become the mouthpiece for a new kind of revisionist history. He wants to mix up Zionism with Nazism. Nazism, which rounded up, selected on racial grounds and murdered the Jews of Europe, is symbolic of all that is evil in the world. Livingstone wants people to think of Zionism as being linked, similar and in alliance with it.

This is not only nonsense, it is also antisemitic; to say that Zionists are like Nazis designates the national liberation movement of the Jewish people as pure evil; it demonizes Jews and it normalizes Hitler; it licenses and encourages people to relate to Zionists, that is the overwhelming majority of living Jews, as they would relate to Nazis.

Livingstone has even begun to resemble David Irving in the way he fixes on particular grains of half-truth about Hitler and weaves them into one big lie.  But he does it with confidence and with charisma.  He looks radical, and many people come away with the feeling that there must be something to it.  And quite a few people are open to the notion that the Zionists are bad and the Zionists are liars and that clever and brave Ken can show us exactly how.

He keeps repeating the Livingstone formulation, for which he is famous. All of this storm about antisemitism, he says, is manufactured by Zionists and Blairites to silence criticism of Israel and to smear the left. They know there is nothing to it, but they do it in order to gain advantage. The allegation of antisemitism is, today, portrayed as the root of Zionist power.  Secondary antisemitism asks: "When will the Germans forgive the Jews for the Holocaust?"  Livingstone won’t rest until people believe that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and until people believe that Zionists who remember the Holocaust are doing so out of some ulterior motive.

Livingstone keeps on repeating that his Jewish friends agree with him; and there is indeed a small but noisy coterie of Jews ready to bear witness against the Jewish community and to whitewash their hero.

Livingstone is not a jolly, harmless old bloke who is basically on the right side and who supports the Palestinians; he has spent much of his life crafting antisemitic discourse for mass public consumption.  
There is a bigger problem of political antisemitism in the Labour Party than Livingstone; the leadership of the party itself is implicated in the kind of politics which cultivates it. 

And now, Labour is not even able decisively to distance itself from Livingstone by expelling him.  No doubt, Livingstone will still be invited to do media work and he will still be treated as a respectable and experienced political leader; because even now, that is how he is seen by many.

David Hirsh is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, author of the forthcoming book 'Contemporary Left Antisemitism'