Just what the Doctor Prescribed
By Ian Fantom
Since the election in 2015 of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of Britain’s Labour Party there has been a crescendo of ‘antisemitism’ talk in the party, and talk of Jeremy Corbyn “not doing enough to combat antisemitism”. There has been constant talk in the mainstream media of a resurgence of antisemitism throughout Britain, with particular attention being focussed on the Labour Party. There were reports of members being targeted for apparently innocuous comments, such as Naz Shah, who was forced to apologise for retweeting a satirical cartoon by Norman Finkelstein about relocating Israel to the United States, and former Lord Mayor of London Ken Livingston, who, in defending her, stated, “When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. Ken Livingstone was suspended, and in his own defence he asked, “how can the truth be an offence?”. He stated that there was a “well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic”.
Later, during a pro-Corbyn counter-demonstration in Parliament Square, organised by the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Party member Stan Keable was secretly filmed by the BBC saying that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi regime – “a well documented if shameful historical fact”, he wrote later. For this he lost his job with a Labour-controlled London council, and his union refused to support him. He told me he was also expelled from the party. A few months earlier a new group had been set up under the name ‘Labour Against the Witch-hunt’, and their website campaigns for the reinstatement of the growing number of members who have been suspended or expelled from the party. Stan Keable is their honorary secretary.
There has been constant pressure on Jeremy Corbyn from Zionists in the party to include the new ‘Internationally Accepted Definition of Antisemitism’ in the party’s code of conduct. By this they are referring to the ‘Working Definition of Antisemitism’, adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Eventually this was passed by the National Executive Committee and by the Parliamentary Labour Party, with just eight Members of Parliament voting against. According to this new definition, it would be considered ‘antisemitic’ to criticise Israel or Zionism. A Scottish member of the Labour Party and shop steward in the massive GMB union, Peter Gregson, was expelled from his union for campaigning against that new definition being adopted by the union. He was defended by an orthodox rabbi. He appealed and defended himself at the London headquarters of the GMB on 4 March 2019. He was unsuccessful, but by this time had 1 560 signatures of Labour Party members declaring, “Israel is a racist endeavour”, “brazenly breaking the IHRA rule”, he states. He is currently ‘under investigation’ by the Labour Party. His own write-up of the case appears at Change.org. A different slant was put on the case by the Jewish News and the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, though the Revolutionary Communist Group supported him.
I took advantage of his trip to London for his appeal at the union’s headquarters on 5 March, 2019, by inviting him to talk at a group whose meetings I organise each month, which we call Keep Talking. A colleague and I set up that group in 2010 to take over from the declining 9/11 Truth movement in London, which some of us believed to have been sabotaged from within.
The focus of our group had not been on Israel, or Zionism, and we tacitly agreed amongst ourselves not to deal with the Holocaust issue, because that was so taboo in the UK that any onslaught from the Zionist lobby could completely derail us from our main topic, which was false-flag terrorism and causes of wars. In fact, my colleague, Dr Nick Kollerstrom, author of many investigative books, including ‘Terror on the Tube’, had been targeted in a witch-hunt for a literature review he wrote on ‘The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion’ and a comment about a swimming pool at Auschwitz, since deleted. I defended Nick Kollerstrom’s right to investigate that topic, and to write about it freely, though I myself had no knowledge of the topic, and so no views on it. That was the seminal incident that led to Keep Talking being set up.
Even so, our Keep Talking group wasn’t spared. In November 2016 our guest speaker was physicist and long-term weather forecaster Piers Corbyn, who explained his model of climate change and why he rejected the theory of the greenhouse effect for global warming. At the end of the talk he was asked by a newcomer, sitting on the front row, for his views on the Holocaust, to which he replied, “On some things it’s best not to have views”. Piers Corbyn had stated right at the beginning of his talk that if the press were to attack him it would be to get at his brother, Jeremy Corbyn, and indeed, it turned out that the newcomer on the front row was a journalist from The Daily Mail, who subsequently wrote up a story based on a book on the bookstall, ‘Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth and Reality’ by Nick Kollerstrom. I managed to get that article pulled in the paper edition, but nevertheless it appeared in the Internet pages of Mail Online. Subsequently, three of our meetings had to be called off, the first one because of an aggressive mob outside the venue, whilst the police stood idly by, even when a 74-year-old colleague of mine was thrown to the ground. The second was called off “on police advice” by the venue, when Jewish News put out a fabrication that we were about to discuss Mossad’s role in the death of Princess Diana, in the knowledge that we had stated that none of us had any knowledge or views on any involvement from Mossad. I have been persuing that under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. The third was called off when the board of the Conway Hall Ethical Society in London, which has hosted meetings on ‘conspiracy theories’ in the past, cancelled our bookings. None of these Keep Talking meetings was about Israel or Zionism. These incidents did, however, set me off investigating the groups and individuals involved. Such events were becoming widespread in the country, even resulting in the cancellation of jazz concerts by Unz contributor Gilad Atzmon, who has twice been a speaker at Keep Talking.
In the meantime, several ‘moderate’ Labour Party Members of Parliament have resigned from the party, to form a new parliamentary grouping, the Independent Group, to be joined by some who then resigned from the Conservative Party. They all resigned because of disagreements with their parties over Brexit, and they are generally regarded as ‘Remainers’, but the former Labour Party members conflate this with ‘antisemitism’ in the party. Since then, many have been saying in the mainstream media that Brexit is being sabotaged. And now, Remainer Jess Philips, MP, who is a member of Labour Friends of Israel, is emerging as the Establishment candidate to challenge Jeremy Corbyn, saying that Corbyn “won’t admit he’s a sexist antisemite”.
In Keep Talking we eventually decided to tackle this issue head on. In my investigations, tracing the organisations and people back in time, I came across the complete diaries of Theodor Herzl. A study of his writings reveals a lot about his plans that was for many years kept from the public, and even now is little understood amongst the public. Yet these writings explain the current resurgence in ‘antisemitism’, and why this should have been expected when the Labour Party voted for a leader whose wish was to return the party to its Socialist roots.
The Doctor’s Diaries
Dr Theodor Herzl was a Viennese journalist and playwright, and, according to the dust cover of Marvin Lowenthal’s 1956 ‘The Diaries of Theodor Herzl’, was “the father of the State of Israel, a heroic and legendary figure, beloved and revered by countless followers”. Undoubtedly, many present-day Zionists will be using Herzl as a role-model. Yet until 1960 only sanitised versions of his diaries were published. Herzl specifically requested this in Book 1 of his diaries: [page 55]
When this book is published, the prescriptions for the organization of the government will be omitted. The people must be guided to the good according to principles unknown to them. Therefore the editors of the book – if I am no longer alive – shall extract the administrative maxims and keep them in the secret State Archives. Only the Doge and the Chancellor may read them. To be omitted are also those remarks which could annoy foreign governments. But the course the negotiations took shall be retained, so that our people may see how I led the Jews home.
Medical doctors in the UK used to hide their prescriptions by writing them in Latin; Dr Herzl has other means. So what was Dr Herzl’s prescription that he was hiding from the public? The present generation is allowed to know, because Herzl wrote at the end of his Book 1: “after we have done everything that is necessary to carry out our plan inexpensively, we shall make our entire program public”.
In 1960 ‘The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl’ was published. The Preface states: “Hundreds of passages, a number covering several pages, were omitted because of political or personal considerations”, adding that the diaries “belong to history, and not only can, but should be made public”. A colleague of mine, who had handed me a list of quotations from the diaries, told me: “There are many versions of the diaries – I have 6 different releases but only one is complete and no surprise the incomplete ones don’t contain the interesting parts. It took me 2 years to locate a physical source and eventually got all 5 volumes from a book dealer in Jerusalem at a cost of over £250. The complete one is by The Herzl Press in 1960 edited by Raphael Patai and translated by Harry Zohn”. It seems that the complete diaries were eventually published in order to be hidden in plain sight. The volumes were later scanned and posted on the Internet, but I was warned that I should download them quickly before they disappear.
Rich Jews and Poor Jews
Theodor Herzl. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Herzl wrote: “I wanted in particular to contrast the suffering, despised, and decent mass of poor Jews with the rich ones. The latter experience nothing of anti-Semitism which they are actually and mainly responsible for”. So he has defined the problem as having been caused mainly by the ‘rich Jews’, for which the ‘poor Jews’ were paying the price. He told a colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, “I understand what anti-Semitism is about. We Jews have maintanied ourselves, even if through no fault of our own, as a foreign body among the various nations. In the ghetto we have taken on a number of anti-social qualities. Our character has been corrupted by oppression, and it must be restored through some other kind of pressure. Actually, anti-Semitism is a consequence of the emancipation of the Jews. … They do not realize that we are what we are because they have made us that way amidst tortures, because the Church made usury dishonorable for Christians, and because the rulers forced us to deal in money”. So now he’s blaming the Christian Churches for banning usury, almost as if that were an antisemitic act. Herzl is making it clear that the root of antisemitism is the usury brought about by the ‘rich Jews’, for which the ‘poor Jews’ are made to suffer. Yet he doesn’t attempt to tackle that problem, but replaces it by another. “Throughout our two thousand years of dispersion, we have been without unified political leadership. I regard this as our chief misfortune”, he states. “Now, if we had a united political leadership, the necessity for which I need not demonstrate further and which should by no means constitute a secret society – if we had such leadership, we could tackle the solution of the Jewish question – from above, from below, from all sides”. In other words, it’s a power grab, in which the ‘rich Jews’ will control the minds of the ‘poor Jews’. Herzl takes this further by declaring, “It is a military campaign”.
Planning a War
“The exodus to the Promised Land constitutes in practical terms an enormous job of transportation, unprecedented in the modern world”, he stated then asked himself, “Did I say “transportation’?” Yes, he did, and people have been suspended from the Labour party in the present era for mentioning the ‘transportation agreement’ between the Zionists and the National Socialists. Yet mass transportation is exactly what was in Herzl’s mind. He talks of a “proletariat of intellectuals”, saying, “I shall form the general staff and the cadres of the army which is to seek, discover, and take over the land.
Earlier in his diaries [p 17] he wrote to Baron von Hirsch, a rich Jew who had been funding the resettlement of refugee Jews in Argentina, asking for a meeting. He included the first draft of his letter, saying he may have made some changes, and adding, “But in substance, those were its contents, and again the only fear I had was that Hirsch or some third party looking over his shoulder might take me for a money-seeker”. That meeting took place on Whit Monday, 1895. He “dressed himself with discreet care”, explaining: “One must not show rich people too much deference”. In fact, he was extremely arrogant when he got to the meeting. Later the same day, he wrote to Baron Hirsch: “On returning home I found that I had stopped on page 6 [of his notes], and yet I had 22 pages. Due to your impatience you heard only the beginning; where and how my idea begins to blossom you did not get to hear”. After about three pages in his diary he comes to the point:
I spoke of an army, and you already interrupted me when I began to speak of the (moral) training necessary for its march. I let myself be interrupted. And yet I have already drawn up the further details, the entire plan. I know all the things it involves; Money, money, and more money; means of transportation; the provisioning of great multitudes (which does not mean just food and drink, as in the simple days of Moses); the maintenance of manly discipline; the organization of departments; emigration treaties with the heads of some states, transit treaties with others, formal guarantees from all of them; the construction of new, splendid dwelling places. Beforehand tremendous propaganda, tremendous propaganda, the popularizition of the idea through newspapers, books, pamphlets, talks by travelling lecturers, pictures, songs. Everything directed from one center with sureness of purpose and with vision. But I would have had to tell you eventually what flag I will unfurl and how. And then you would have asked mockingly: A flag, what is that? A stick with a rag on it? – No, sir, a flag is more than that. With a flag one can lead men wherever one wants to, even into the Promised Land.
He is clearly preparing for a military campaign, and the two basic ingredients for any war of aggression are money and propaganda. He called it ‘education’ in the meeting with Hirsch, and Hirsch was having none of it.
Project Fear
In his conversation with a colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, Ludwig Speidel, he reports himself on page 10 as saying: “However, anti-Semitism, which is a strong and unconscious force among the masses, will not harm the Jews. I consider it to be a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of a group by the masses, and will perhaps lead to its being absorbed. Education is accomplished only through hard knocks”. He refers to the “education of our people” in his subsequent conversation with Hirsch on page 20, saying, “There are two possible aims: either we stay where we are or we emigrate somewhere else. … At any rate, in the meantime new generations will arise whom we must educate for our purposes”. He continues: “Now, with regard to education, I propose to employ, from the outset, methods quite different from those which you are using”, but before he has explained what they are he says some things about Hirsch’s methods, which Hirsch contests. Then Herzl continues: “To attract Jews to rural areas you would have to tell them some fairy-tale about how they may strike gold there”. In his third letter to Baron Hirsch he writes: “There are, ultimately and above all, the Jewish masses, and I shall know how to get across to them”. “After ten years”, Herzl writes on page 51, dated 6 June 1895, “the movement will be irresistible, and the Jews will come running to us barefoot through fog and darkness. Nothing will he able to stop them, at least not in the countries in which they are free to move. If there should then be attempts to impede the free passage of the Jews, we shall know how to mobilise the public opinion of the world (liberals, socialists, anti-Semites) against the imprisonment of the Jews. Then, too, our diplomats will be at work (we shall make financial concessions in the form of loans and special gifts). Once we are outside, we shall put our trust in our army, our purchased friendships, and a Europe weakened and divided by militarism and socialism. This is Jewish emancipation”. Then on page 56, dated 9 June, he writes, “In the beginning we shall be supported by the anti-Semites through a recrudescence of persecution”. According to a translator’s note, he writes ‘recrudescence’ in French. It’s an English medical term, too. It means a fresh outbreak, or a resurgence, of a condition. So he is planning a resurgence of antisemitism, in order to get his plans off the ground. That could explain how in different generations they can claim that antisemitism is getting worse.
On 12 June he describes plans for persuading governments to co-operate in the transfer of Jews, and on page 83 he writes: “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, acredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. … At first they must not be given large fees for this; otherwise we shall spoil our instruments and them make despicable as ‘Stooges of the Jews’. Later their fees will increase, and in the end we shall have only Gentile officials in the countries from which we will have emigrated”. He continues on the next page: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends; the anti-Semitic countries our allies”.
Still on 12 June, but now on page 96, he expresses the same sentiments without using the word ‘antisemitic’: “Today the thought arises in me that I may be solving more more than the ]ewish Question. Namely, tout bonnement [Very neatly], the social question! I don’t know, I doubt it, because in all these matters I have the creation of new conditions in mind; and the difficulty in the social question is precisely that everywhere men are bogged down in ancient abuses, lengthy stagnation, and inherited or acquired wrong. Whereas I presuppose a virginal soil. But if it turns out to be true, what a gift of God to the Jews!”
Two days later, on page 143, he says in an imagined speech to the Rothschilds’ Family Council: “I have already told you that we want to let respectable anti-Semites participate in our project, respecting their independence, which is valuable to us – as a sort of people’s control authority”. In another imagined address to the Rothschilds’ Family Council, he writes on 15 June, page 152: “Any person of discernment must see the development clearly even now. But no great exertion will be necessary to stimulate the migration movement. The anti-Semites are already taking care of this for us. As soon as our institution becomes known, the anti-Semites will agitate for the Society in the government, in parliament, at rallies, and in the papers. Good for the Jews who are going with us. Woe to them who will let themselves be forced out only by brutal arguments”.
Clearly, the plan was to use the ‘antisemites’ to instil fear amongst the ‘poor Jews’, in order to get them to move ‘voluntarily’, and those ‘poor Jews’ who don’t go along with the plan will suffer the consequences. Later, in the same imagined address, now on page 180, he writes that “the legal equality of the Jews, where it exists, can no longer be abolished”, and that “that would immediately drive all Jews, poor and rich alike, into the arms of the revolutionary parties”. “Therefore, no effective measures can actually be taken against us”, Herzl writes, “And yet, anti-Semitism increases among the nations every day, every hour, and must continue to grow, because the causes have not been and cannot be removed”. Yet he has already told Speidel about the fundamental cause of antisemitism being to do with usury, or the perception on usury, and Speidel agreed. He is clearly not trying to solve a problem, but to create one.
An honorary anti-Semite
Herzl envisaged that full disclosure of his project would eventually appear in his newspaper, to which he owed a debt of gratitude. However, in Book 2 of the diaries it becomes clear that the newspaper wanted to publicly distance itself from Zionism. An appendix at the end of Marvin Lowenthal’s 1956 Diaries, in an entry for ‘Neue Freie Presse’, states that a colleague of Herzl’s commented: “This leading Austrian newspaper was apprehensive of being identified with a movement which was, after all, only the private concern of one of its most eminent contributors. It sought rather to identify itself with German-Austrian liberalism. In Zionism it saw a kind of Jewish edition of anti-Semitism”.
The appendix also includes an entry on the publisher of the newspaper, Eduard Bacher, stating: “In the Jewish question, Bacher’s liberalism was equivalent to anti-Zionism. … In December 1899, it looked as though Bacher was prepared to sell out his interests in the ‘Neue Freie Presse’, and Herzl, with the financial backing of his family, offered to buy them. Days of exciting scenes ensued, with the negotiations spiced by quarrels and reconciliations. Eventually Bacher did not sell, and Herzl was given the highest salary on the paper and put in complete charge of its literary department”.
This power struggle constitutes much of Book 2 of his diaries. Herzl states, modestly, on page 99, “What an example I am to the poor, aspiring Jews, such as I used to be myself!”. So he was poor, but now he, supposedly with family connections, has the financial backing to purchase Vienna’s leading newspaper. Perhaps the key to understanding this lies in interpreting his subsequent mind-bending sentence: “If my object had been money, I should never have been able to come face to face with the biggest financial power on earth, the Rothschilds, the way I am going to do”. That sentence might make sense if it had ended with “the way I have done”. So how did he come into the money?
As Herzl nears the end of his Book 1, he further demonstrates his “kind of Jewish edition of anti-Semitism”, with: “The anti-Semites will have carried the day. Let them have this satisfaction, for we too shall be happy. They will have turned out to be right because they are right”. Indeed, Herzl later wrote, in Book 2, on page 266: “Bacher joked: ‘The Jews will listen to you more peevishly than the Gentiles. You will become an honorary anti-Semite’”. I doubt whether Bacher was joking.
Recrudescences
So how does one bring about a Herzlian recrudescence, as prescribed by our doctor, when he stated: “In the beginning we shall be supported by the anti-Semites through a recrudescence of persecution”?
We are clearly now in the grip of another Herzlian recrudescence. In December 2018 The Times of Israel reported “Unprecedented EU poll finds 90% of European Jews feel anti-Semitism increasing: Anti-Semitism ‘disturbingly normalized,’ says EU rights chief, after massive survey of 12 EU states finds 85% of Jews rate it the biggest social problem in their countries”. Only at the end of the article do they point out that the survey measured Jews’ “perceptions of anti-Semitism”, rather than actual antisemitism, and publish a quote saying: “We can clearly see that they feel anxious – and indeed, more anxious than they did five years ago in most instances – and whilst these are valuable indicators, genuine threat levels are much more objectively and accurately measured by security services than these types of surveys”.
Neither the article nor the survey itself states which definition of ‘antisemitism’ is being used. Since the previous survey several EU countries had adopted the new ‘IHRA’s working definition of anti-Semitism’, but the organisation that ran the poll, together with IPSOS, and published the poll, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), had not adopted that definition. One major change has been the interpretation of criticism of Israel as being antisemitic, and the survey implies that definition when, for instance, they state: “The most common anti-Semitic statements Jews come across regularly, according to the survey, are comparisons between Israelis and the Nazis with regard to the Palestinians”. ‘Antisemitism’ used to mean prejudice or hatred of Jews as Jews. If this is anti-Semitic, in the sense of anti-Jewish then it is also anti-Teutonic. But under the new Zionists definiton of ‘antisemitism’, the word is as remote as ever from the meaning of ‘anti-Jewish’. The Times of Israel report also states, “Suggestions that Jews have too much power and ‘exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes’ also ranked highly”. Again, does that really suggest prejudice against Jews or hatred of Jews as Jews? The main proponent of the idea of Holocaust victimhood was Norman Finkelstein, in his book ‘The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering’.
The FRA’s director, Michael O’Flaherty, called on EU states to “take note and step up their efforts to prevent and combat anti-Semitism”. There seems to be a lack of separation between objective polling and campaigning on the basis of the results, which were not on ‘anti-Semitism’ but on perceptions of ‘anti-Semitism’. The launch of the survey was streamed, and within seconds it was announced that the survey was part of the fight against antisemitism. There is clearly an agenda in this project. The survey was carried out online, and Jews were notified via their organisations. The survey report admits: “Unaffiliated Jews are difficult to reach for surveys in the absence of the sampling frames, and it can be assumed that they are underrepresented in the current sample”. That would especially be relevant when we are talking merely about perceptions.
A clear example of Herzl’s plans to frighten the ‘poor Jews’, or the ‘little Jews’ as he sometimes called them, was Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeal to French Jews to relocate to Israel, following the Charlie Hebdo outrage. “To all Jews of France, all Jews of Europe”, he tweeted, “Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home”, the Independent reported. Later he gave a speech in France, saying: “These days we are blessed with another privilege, a privilege that didn’t exist for generations of Jews – the privilege to join their brothers and sisters in their historic homeland of Israel”. He spoke, not for the first time, of every French Jew being welcomed to Israel “with open arms”.
Was Netanyahu really saying that Jews would be safer in war-torn Israel than in France? That’s the message that was coming across. To me, this is reminiscent of the Dreyfuss Affair in Herzl’s time. Herzl later put it about that he had been motivated to write ‘The Jewish State’ by the Dreyfus Affair, “in order to promote the Zionist cause among non-Jewish Americans”, according to Herzl’s biographer, Shlomo Avineri. Yet the timing does not support this idea, and there is no mention of the Dreyfus Affair in Book 1 of Herzl’s diaries. That was used retrospectively to as a scare tactic.
Then on 21 February 2019 The Times of Israel announced: ‘Anti-Semitism worst since WWII, Macron tells French Jewish group: President vows to ban racist groups and recognize anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism after spate of recent incidents targeting Jews’. Macron used the word ‘resurgence’ rather than ‘recrudescence’, but it means the same. The Times of Israel then gives the game away by refering to the Dreyfus Affair, which Herzl had claimed to have led him to Zionism. “Anti-Semitism has a long history in France where society was deeply split at the end of the 19th century by the Alfred Dreyfus affair over a Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of treason”, the article states. The article also stated: “Macron announced measures including legislation to fight hate speech on the internet, to be introduced by May”. I like the beautiful ambiguity of that statement. I think May would be in dire difficulties if she tried the same thing on in Westminster, which would be akin to her failed attempt to introduce a ‘Counter-Extremism Bill’ which, if it had gone into law, would have enabled any critics of the state whom the state deemed to be ‘extremists’ to be arrested and probably imprisoned.
Zionism versus Socialism
So why should this Herzlian recrudescence be targeting Jermy Corbyn’s Labour Party in particular? I think Jeremy Corbyn is the least likely person I’ve ever met to advance ‘racist’ sentiments, whether they be anti-Jewish or anti-any-other-ethnic-group. Yet the Times of Israel article states: “The UK results [of the survey], experts suggest, may point to a ‘Corbyn factor’ connected to the ongoing row over anti-Semitism in the British Labour party”.
The former Labour Party MPs, who quit to form the Independent Group, seem to be conflating Brexit with antisemitism in the Labour Party. Yet the timing, and the coordinated resignations shortly afterwards from the Conservative Party, citing Brexit, but not antisemitism in the Conservative Party, makes it clear that the issue was Brexit, and that antisemitism had been weaponised. Jonathan Cook, writing in Middle East Eye on 27 December last year, presented an analysis of the antisemitism witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn, headed ‘Labour and anti-semitism in 2018: The truth behind the relentless smear campaign against Corbyn’. “Bombarded by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-semitism menace”, he writes. He reports on the above survey, as well as other surveys and supposed antisemitic incidents. “The Guardian has been at the forefront of framing Corbyn as either indifferent to, or actively assisting in, the supposed rise of anti-semitism in Labour”, he writes. In fact, he writes, “Other surveys show that, when measured by objective criteria, the Labour party scores relatively well: The percentage of members holding anti-Semitic views is substantially lower than in the ruling Conservative party and much the same as in Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats”.
But why would Jeremy Corbyn be especially targeted? Jonathan Cook writes: “Israeli politicians loathe Corbyn because he has made support for the Palestinian people a key part of his platform”. That is a commonly held view, and is undoubtedly true. However, a study of Herzl’s complete diaries will show that the problem has much deeper foundations than that.
Herzl makes it clear that he is against democracy. He writes (page 169): “I am against democracy because it is extreme in its approval and disapproval, tends to idle parliamentary babble, and produces that base class of men, and professional politicians. Nor are present-day nations really suited to the democratic form of government; and I believe they will become less and less suited to it. … Politics must work from the top down”. He envisages an ‘aristocratic republic’. “Our people, to whom we are presenting the new country, will gradually accept the new Constitution that we give it. But wherever opposition may appear, we shall break it down. Everywhere we shall try it with friendly persuasion, but if need be we shall push it through by brutal force. … We shall impose extensive but firm limits on public opinion”. That sounds to me like a good description of where British politics is heading at the moment, especially when Herzl states in the same context, “Government by referendum does not make sense in my opinion, because in politics there are no simple questions which can be answered merely by Yes or No”. The eighth Labour MP to resign on the basis of Brexit and antisemitism was Joan Ryan, leader of Labour Friends of Israel, who had been featured in Al Jazeera’s The Lobby programme as one of the main players in the undermining of Jeremy Corbyn.
Herzl makes many references to Socialism and Socialists, and is clearly not in favour.
“You talk like a Socialist”, he told Baron Hirsch when he first met him (page 24). In an imagined speech to the Rothschild’s Family Council he states: “My view is that Socialism is a purely technological problem. The distribution of Nature’s forces through electricity will eliminate it” (page 45). In his first letter to Bismarck, he states that he is not a Social Democrat (page 119), and two pages later, in discussing the consequences that would arise if Jews were to be deprived of equal citizenship, he states, “Immediately all Jews … would join the Socialist Party, with all their resources”. In another imagined address to the Family Council, he states (page 157): “the moneyed Jews are driven to pure speculation by the persecution of capital by the Socialists and anti-Semites”. On July 15, 1895, he asked a friend what he thought of the anti-Jewish riots in Vienna. “’The Jews must turn Socialist’, the friend replied, obstinately”, wrote Herzl (page 202). Ten days later (page 214) he writes that he asked a local friend what his solution was. “The Jews have to join the Socialist movement!”, the friend replied. Herzl wrote, “In my opinion, that would be as nonsensical as Socialism itself”. It is clear that Herzl regards Socialism as a rival to Zionism, especially when he writes: “I hear that he [Birnbaum] has turned away from Zionism and gone over to Socialism when my appearance led him back to Zionism again”.
In Volume 2 Herzl makes this rivalry between Zionism and Socialism even more evident. He wrote on March 17, 1897, about the first Zionist meeting to take place in Vienna, which had taken place the previous day. “A few Socialists spoke in opposition to Zionism, using old arguments”, he wrote, “The Zionist resolution was carried, with only 50 voting against it. Then the Socialists intoned the ‘Lied der Arbeit’ [Hymn of Labour], whereupon our people responded with the ‘Bundeslied’ [Song of the Covenant], which deeply moved everyone”. In September 1897 he relates a conversation with Count von Bülow, who was about to become German Foreign Minister. “The anti-Socialist aspects of Zionism was gone into in the greatest detail”, he reported (page 666). On the next page Herzl stated: “I made my position clear – that it was folly on the part of the Jews to join the Socialist Party, which would soon rid itself of them”. And on the next page, he wrote, “With regard to the Socialist aspects of the problem, at any rate, we saw eye to eye. He was impressed when I mentioned the fact that at the University of Vienna we have taken students away from Socialism”. On page 700 he talked of “the most effective propaganda against the Socialists”.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum
I think it’s very clear from this that Hezl was against Socialism. This, together with the methods advocated by Herzl, will explain why the Labour Party, as soon as it returned to a Socialist leadership, had a problem with the recrudescence of ‘antisemitism’. If criticism of Zionism is deemed ‘antisemitic’, then criticism of Zionism’s iconic figure, “the father of the State of Israel, a heroic and legendary figure, beloved and revered by countless followers”, and undoubtedly a role-model for many Zionists, will undoubtedly be deemed ‘antisemitic’. But the Labour Party is not anti-Jewish, nor is there a problem of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Labour Party. The problem is that Zionism is endemically anti-Socialist, and that in order to combat Socialism in the Labour Party the present-day Zionists are doing just what the doctor prescribed.
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