As soon as I saw the Jewish Labour Movement was holding a conference in London on Sunday 14th January, I booked to attend. I’m not a member of the Labour Party nor of the Jewish Labour Movement, but these were not required, and as a politically minded Jew with a longstanding family link to the Labour Party I was interested to discover more about the organisation and its perspective on the world.
My family link with the Labour Party is that my grandfather David Weitzman served as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for the north London constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington for 34 years, having first been elected in the landslide victory in the 1945 general election just before the end of the Second World War. As a teenager I campaigned for my grandfather in the two 1974 elections. He retired in 1979.
When the Jewish Labour Movement issued the programme for their conference I was intrigued by three sessions on the role of ‘faith’ in politics. The panels included several rabbis who’ve been involved in the Our Jewish Values declaration which I have strongly supported in a previous Substack article (‘A Tale of Three Declarations’). The role of religion in politics is not one that’s often discussed nowadays in the UK, certainly not in a Jewish context.
Two days before the event, however, the South of England Organiser of the Jewish Labour Movement emailed me to say that they had rescinded my booking for the conference because ‘we have reason to believe that you do not share the aims and values of the Jewish Labour Movement.’
This surprised me firstly because I had no idea that the Jewish Labour Movement knew who I was. One of the features of the increasingly Stalinist system of the last few years is that government and mainstream political organisations have affected total ignorance of the existence of grassroots resistance – they have never responded to any of our petitions or protests or demands for a public debate. They have been supported by compliant mainstream media which (for instance) entirely failed to report on the huge anti-lockdown protests in London in the spring of 2021 – especially ironical given the current media obsession with the pro-Palestinian protests in London on Saturday afternoons. They have pretended to ignore us, but it would seem that they have actually read and listened to most of what we’ve written and said.
By booking to attend their conference, I forced the Jewish Labour Movement to reveal their hand. They had to admit that they knew about me and about what I’ve been saying, and that they didn’t like it. So they excluded me. I think they would have been wiser to have said nothing and let me attend the conference anyway – what harm would I have done? – but they gave in to an instinct to ostracise anyone who deviates from the party line. Maybe they were scared that I would spread my dangerous message about Judaism to others attending the conference.
The irony about the Jewish Labour Movement’s decision to exclude me from their conference is that it contradicts the Jewish idea of ‘Klal Yisrael’ – the ‘community of Jews’ – which is based on the principle that the strength in unity of the Jewish people comes from embracing a diversity of opinion rather than by suppressing all deviation from an officially sanctioned narrative. ‘Real unity is not sameness, it’s the ability to combine difference,’ explains Rabbi Reuven Feirman in this video presentation of the concept of Klal Yisrael:
The Talmud – ‘the teaching’, the corpus of Jewish religious law – has been described as ‘one long argument’, with dissenting opinions recorded alongside the prevailing ones. The Jewish practice of arguing over religious texts is known as ‘machloket’, which means a constructive debate – ‘for the sake of heaven’ – the rule being that you must conduct the discussion in the spirit of looking for a solution, rather than simply trying to win an argument.
If Judaism is about anything, it’s about asking questions – and certainly not about controlling who’s allowed to ask them. The suppression of different views is in itself anti-Jewish. For the Jewish Labour Movement not to have allowed a diversity of opinion runs contrary to the Jewish values on which it claims to set great store.
The Jewish Labour Movement lists seven values on its website:
https://www.jewishlabour.uk/about
These include commitments ‘to apply Jewish ethical principles to create a society based on social justice’ and ‘to fight all forms of discrimination’. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that they didn’t actively pursue the principle of social justice when they supported lockdowns which resulted in a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich – and were known to be doing so at the time – and that they didn’t fight against discrimination when they said nothing to defend people who had refused to submit themselves to untested and unsafe COVID vaccines and had been sacked from their jobs and excluded from participating in society as a result.
To gain a better idea of what an expert on the subject might consider to be Jewish values, I looked at a book written in the middle of last century by Rabbi Louis Jacobs, appropriately entitled ‘Jewish Values’. Jacobs was not only most respected British rabbi of his time but in 2005 he was voted by readers of the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ newspaper the greatest British Jew of the past three and a half centuries.
Jacobs’ book has chapters on eleven different Jewish values. The first six are religious in nature – the study of the Torah, the love of G_d, the fear of G_d, the sanctification of G_d’s name, trust in G_d and holiness – so I wouldn’t expect them to be promoted by a predominantly secular organisation such as the Jewish Labour Movement. The other five values, however, are all relevant – humility, loving thy neighbour, compassion, truth and peace.
One might well wonder why so few of these fundamental Jewish values are included by the Jewish Labour Movement in the list on its website of the values it claims to uphold.
There is no reference, for example, to ‘loving thy neighbour as thyself’ (Leviticus 19:18), although it’s generally regarded as the fundamental principle of Judaism. The Jewish Labour Movement does declare a commitment to fight discrimination, which is one aspect of loving thy neighbour, but it’s far from the whole of it.
Nor does the Jewish Labour Movement make any mention of compassion on its website. If it were truly interested in upholding the Jewish values of compassion and of loving thy neighbour, then surely it would want to voice concern for the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of British citizens who are victims of the COVID vaccines – who’ve been maimed and had their lives ruined as a result of submitting themselves to an experimental medical procedure because they were told that it was ‘the right thing to do’. I’ve not seen or heard the Jewish Labour Movement make any reference to the plight of British vaccine victims.
‘Social justice’ is included in the Jewish Labour Movement’s list of its values, but that’s not the same thing as loving thy neighbour or compassion. Social justice considers disparities from the perspective of class and race and ‘gender’, as opposed to the welfare of individual people. And it isn’t actually a Jewish value but a socialist principle which has been retrofitted into Judaism. An obscure Hebrew phrase ‘tikkun olam’ (‘repair the world’) has been dredged up to make social justice look like a Jewish value. Jacobs doesn’t mention anything about social justice in his book, because nobody at the time thought of it as a Jewish value.
Perhaps the most glaring omission from the Jewish Labour Movement list is any reference to truth. It’s impossible it wouldn’t know the importance of truth as a Jewish value. Jacobs says Judaism recognises three kinds of truth – speaking the truth to G_d, speaking the truth to one’s fellows, and speaking the truth to oneself. Obviously as a secular organisation the Jewish Labour Movement isn’t going to mention the first of these but what about the second and the third? Why doesn’t it mention them?
Truth in Jewish tradition means not simply the avoidance of telling lies but actively going out of one’s way to say what is right and – if need be – to speak truth to power. For example – going back to the issue of the astonishing large number of people who have been disabled or killed by the COVID vaccines and the consequently elevated level of ‘excess deaths’ (deaths above the statistical average) – the pursuit of truth might plausibly lead one to support the campaign of the independent MP Andrew Bridgen to have these issues publicly investigated. I don’t think anything has shamed the House of Commons as much as the emptying of the chamber whenever Bridgen has spoken on the subject. Considering that we are looking at the greatest scandal in British political history, one might have hoped that an organisation which prides itself on an attachment to Jewish values would have said something in support of Bridgen’s campaign. But it hasn’t.
As an example of the third kind of truth – speaking the truth to oneself – Jacobs cites Psalm 15, which begins as follows:
‘Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle?
‘Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain?
‘He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart.’
You don’t have to believe in G_d to speak the truth in your heart. You just have to be honest with yourself, and to stick to your principles.
(Whether or not one is personally religious is irrelevant to an understanding of the religious origins of Jewish values. I’ll return to the knotty question of whether the practice of Judaism can be separated from its religious roots in a future Substack article.)
The Jewish Labour Movement says nothing about humility, either. In a Jewish context this refers to the acceptance that one doesn’t necessarily have the right answer or is following the right path. It’s not about thinking less of oneself but about paying more attention to what other people have to say, to learn from their experience. About understanding that one could always do better, and that one should pay more attention to Jewish values.
It would be wonderful if the Jewish Labour Movement felt able to show some humility and accept that it can still learn about the role of Jewish values in political life. It could be a great asset both to Judaism and to politics if it were able to do so. We’re in desperate need of a more ethical approach to the conduct of public life. The Jewish Labour Movement could and should be leading the way.
The Jewish Labour Movement is far from alone among Jewish organisations in having failed to uphold Jewish values in its response (or non-response) to the crimes committed on the pretext of protecting the British people from a respiratory disease. I have singled it out because as representatives of the Labour opposition they were ideally situated to take the Conservative government to task for its wrongdoings, but did not; because of their hypocrisy in ostracising me for supposedly failing to share their values when they have failed to live up to them themselves; because they have taken the trouble to list their values on their website and I think that as a summary of Jewish values relevant to British political life it is not really adequate; because they have presented me with an opportunity to identify those Jewish values which I believe could and should be applied in the political sphere; and because if the Jewish Labour Movement were to uphold and promote these values I’m convinced it could become a powerful force for good, as demonstrated by its willingness to include three sessions at its conference on the topic of faith in politics: I don’t know that any rival organisation would have thought to do this.
One of the commandments issued by G_d to the Israelites in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is that you must rebuke your neighbour for wrongdoing because otherwise you too will bear his sin (Leviticus 19:17). According to this principle, I am obligated to criticise the Jewish Labour Movement for its failure to live up to Jewish values – or otherwise I too will be guilty by association, for neglecting to speak out. The rule here is that if you rebuke your neighbour you must do so with the intention of bringing him to understand the error of his ways, and not simply to cause him embarrassment. That’s why the biblical verse begins, ‘Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart.’
I think the underlying issue is that the Jewish Labour Movement and I have very different views of the relationship of Judaism with the outside world. Essentially it’s the battle between assimilation and tradition which has been going on since the revolt of the Maccabees in the second century BC, about which I wrote in my Substack article ‘The Real Chanukah Story.’ I didn’t mention this in my Chanukah article, because I wanted to focus on the role of religious belief in giving the Maccabees the courage to fight against oppression, but another aspect of the story was the internal division within the Jewish population between the urban merchants and traders who had become ‘Hellenised’ – who had sought to assimilate with their Greek overlords by adopting many of their practices and choosing not to kick up a stink when their religious traditions were attacked – and the traditionally minded farmers in the countryside who were prepared to go to battle to defend the principles of the Torah. This split between Hellenists and traditionalists has run through Judaism ever since.
The Jewish Labour Movement are Hellenised Jews. The kind of Jews who think it prudent to water down their Jewish principles in order to accommodate to the rules of the society in which they live, to push their Judaism only so far as they are allowed by their overlords. When they were told in 2020 that they would have to stop going to synagogue, to cease practising Judaism in the name of ‘following the science’, the Hellenised Jews readily acquiesced – just like their predecessors in the Holy Land in the second century BC. They saw no problem at all in worshipping the false idol of Covidism with its own beliefs and rituals – masks, social distancing, vaccination – and ignored the injunction in the Second Commandment against taking other gods and bowing down before them. They know the powers-that-be don’t want them to say anything about the terrible death toll caused by the COVID vaccines – they know this because the topic is never mentioned in mainstream media – so they have put aside their Jewish values and stayed silent and looked the other way.
The division between Hellenising and what might be called ‘true Torah’ Jews that has run through the whole of Jewish history finds an uncanny parallel in the division that has run through the Labour Party for the whole of its history between the pragmatists and the fundamentalists – between those who’ve argued for necessity of diluting some of the party’s policies in order to attract moderate voters so as to win elections and get into government, and those who’ve maintained what they’d consider a more principled approach, with no dilution of policies but rather the conviction that the public will eventually be persuaded of the righteousness of their cause. The pragmatism-based Hellenising approach of the Jewish Labour Movement finds its antithesis in the conviction-based approach of the rival Jewish Voice for Labour organisation.
This split came to a head over the issue of the leadership of the Labour Party by the left-wing ‘conviction’ MP Jeremy Corbyn between 2015 and 2020. Once Corbyn was elected leader, the then-dormant Jewish Labour Movement was brought back to life to campaign against him, because he’d long been a fierce critic of Israel and a vocal advocate of the Palestinian cause. Corbyn spent the entire five years of his leadership fighting off accusations of antisemitism brought by Zionists associated with the Jewish Labour Movement who wanted him out. It’s moot how far these accusations were inspired by a genuine belief that Corbyn was an antisemite or was in hock to antisemites and how far they served as a pretext to undermine a left-wing pro-Palestinian politician who was perceived to threaten not only the British relationship with Israel but also the entire British political establishment. The rival Jewish Voice for Labour group was set up in 2017 to defend Corbyn against the accusations of antisemitism and to argue that the campaign against him was a spurious one. In the end, the campaign proved successful and Corbyn was forced to resign the leadership. He still sits in Parliament, but as an independent MP.
Whatever his personal views might have been, I have no doubt that accusations of antisemitism were weaponised against Corbyn by his political enemies. I’ve written about the subject in an article for the American website Frontline News:
https://www.frontline.news/post/weaponizing-antisemitism
That said, I’m no fan of Corbyn nor of many of his supporters. I was dismayed by their continued obsession during lockdown with the Palestinian issue, rather than campaigning for the interests of working people here in Britain, which should surely have been their primary concern. They failed to support employees who were sacked from their jobs for refusing to take the experimental and dangerous COVID vaccines. And the reaction of many of them to the pogrom of 7th October last year was obscene – glorifying in the mass murder of innocent people as a supposed act of joyous liberation from colonial oppression. The spectacle of Leftists getting into bed with Islamists is ironical, to say the least. It’s exactly what happened in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – Islamists used the support of Leftists to get into power, then got rid of them (in many cases permanently) once they’d achieved their ambition.
Most of the Jews on the Corbynite Left appear currently to be obsessed with the notion that Israel’s intervention in Gaza is ‘genocide’. I’m no supporter of the Israeli military operation. But a state intent upon genocide would not warn its enemies in advance to evacuate the areas it’s about to attack, as Israel does. To describe what’s happening as ‘genocide’ is so obviously inaccurate that the real question here should be: Why are Israel’s critics, not least its Jewish critics, so insistent on this terminology? Is it just a matter of hyperbole – choosing the strongest term they can find to express their disapproval? As the saying might go, the first casualty of war is language. I think it’s also because the Israeli state has frequently weaponised the memory of the Holocaust to silence censure of its actions, so its critics have turned its own technique back on itself and accused it of the very thing it uses to defend its conduct.
As to whether all of this has led to a ‘rise in antisemitism’, as is being claimed, I don’t know. I do know that organisations which exist to campaign against antisemitism are warning about a rise in antisemitism, but they would say that, wouldn’t they? I do know that a lot of Jews in Britain and elsewhere are frightened because they’re told there’s a rise in antisemitism, but many of us have woken up to the use of fear as a propaganda tool in the last four years, ever since it was deployed to persuade us to submit to the repressive machinery of the COVID regime. Increased reporting of ‘antisemitic incidents’ doesn’t prove a rise in antisemitism. It may simply be that existing antisemites have become more open about expressing their views, but there’s been no increase in the number of people holding such views.
Animosity towards Israel (which isn’t in itself antisemitic) is not the same thing as animosity towards Jews (which is the fundamental definition of antisemitism). While many pro-Palestinian activists clearly do fail to distinguish between the State of Israel and Jewish people as a whole – and many antisemites do hide their antipathy towards Jews behind a façade of ‘anti-Zionism’ – it’s also the case that the State of Israel and many of its supporters have brought this confusion upon themselves by deliberately conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, in order to silence criticism of Israel.
I can’t say whether the pro-Palestinian marches in London on Saturday afternoons are ‘antisemitic hate marches’ as is alleged by one side, or ‘peace marches’ as is claimed by the other. I suspect both descriptions might be true, depending which part of the march one joins, and at what time of day. (Big events of this nature always become more hostile after dark.) They have certainly featured some hateful anti-Israeli and antisemitic chants and banners, but I don’t know how prevalent these are. I can’t go to observe the marches for myself because – although I’m not particularly religious – I do keep the Sabbath, so I won’t take part in any political activity on a Saturday. I wouldn’t criticise Corbynite Jews for going on these marches, since they say they’re promoting the cause of peace, but I would criticise them for failing to speak out against the antisemitic chanting and banners. The presence of Jews on the marches has been exploited by the organisers to claim that there can be nothing antisemitic about them, because many Jews take part.
It does sometimes seem as though the kind of Leftist Jews who participate in the pro-Palestinian marches extend the Jewish value of loving thy neighbour to everyone except their fellow Jews. Ironically, the most common Hebrew term for this value is ‘Ahavat Yisrael’, which means ‘love of one’s fellow Jew’. It’s likely that the injunction in the Torah to love thy neighbour was intended specifically to apply only to Jews because at the time the Hebrew Bible was written, all neighbours were Jews – although the phrase has taken on a much broader application since people of different faiths started living alongside each other, and ‘neighbour’ does now mean neighbour (according to Rabbi Louis Jacobs).
I’ve never believed the official explanation that the pogrom of 7th October occurred because of a ‘failure of military intelligence’. I’m sure the Israeli government knowingly allowed it to happen, in order to have a casus belli to carry out military operations in Gaza. I said as much on my Twitter on the very evening it occurred, and wrote about it in my Substack article ‘What is Israel for?’ on 24th October. What else could explain the failure of the Israeli government not merely to prevent the incursions but to respond to them for several hours, when Israeli citizens under attack were crying out publicly for help? In the following months a lot more evidence has emerged to confirm this view of events, not least from intelligence officers who’ve stated that their efforts to warn of signs of preparation for an attack were pointedly rebuffed by their superiors. There are many theories as to who’s really in charge in Israel, and what the wider geopolitical goals might be, but these are theories to which no-one can legitimately claim to have a definite answer. What can be said for certain is that the Israeli government does not uphold Jewish values.
This is especially unfortunate considering that Israel is the world’s only Jewish state and that whatever it does reflects on Judaism as a whole. Like it or not, Israel is a shop window for Judaism, and if its government is not practising Jewish values then this shows Judaism in a poor light and encourages antisemitism. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion declared that the new country was meant to be as ‘a light unto nations’ (Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6) – something the current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated on several occasions. I don’t think that anyone can reasonably argue that Israel is lighting the way at the moment.
Loving thy neighbour, compassion, truth, humility, the pursuit of peace – which of these Jewish values is the Israeli government upholding by its complicity in the 7th October pogrom in which well over 1,000 of its citizens were murdered, by lying about the reason for its failure to prevent the massacre, and by its military response in Gaza which has led to the deaths of who knows how many thousands of its inhabitants?
The culpability of the Israeli government in respect of the pogrom – which it could and should have prevented – means that none of the actions it’s taking in Gaza can legitimately be justified. (Although equally this does nothing to diminish the culpability of those who perpetrated the pogrom.)
I wouldn’t have expected the Jewish Labour Movement to have joined in the questioning of what really happened on 7thOctober. As Hellenised Jews, this was something they were never going to ask. They knew it was taboo. Otherwise, their response to the events of 7th October has been largely commendable. They have not shown the unconditional support for the Israeli government that one might have expected of a pro-Zionist organisation. They have called for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza (as well as for the immediate release of the hostages). Obviously the Israeli government isn’t going to listen to anything the Jewish Labour Movement have to say. But I don’t see what else they could have done.
According to the published programme, several sessions at the Jewish Labour Movement conference were devoted to examining potential peaceful solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although the official policy of the organisation (and of the Labour Party as a whole) is to support a ‘two-state solution’, this was not the only proposal listed for discussion. I was particularly intrigued by a session on the concept now known as ‘A Land for All’ (originally ‘Two States One Homeland’) which envisages a hybrid between a ‘one-state’ and a ‘two-state’ solution in which separate Palestinian and Israeli states are combined in some form of confederation. Obviously I don’t know what was said at the session, because I wasn’t allowed to attend. But they’ve explained their ideas in detail on their website:
https://www.alandforall.org/english-program/?d=ltr
To judge from the conference programme, the Jewish Labour Movement do their best to adhere to the Jewish value of peace – the only one of the Jewish values listed by Rabbi Louis Jacobs that they mention on their website.
I’m still none the wiser as to why they rescinded my booking for their conference. I’ve asked them to explain, but they haven’t replied. When people are ‘cancelled’, they’re not usually told why that’s been done, because that would open up an avenue to a debate, and organisations that cancel people aren’t generally keen on open and honest dialogue.
The issue might be that I’ve spoken out on two of the big taboo topics of our time – the crimes committed against the people of Britain on the pretence of protecting them from COVID, and the crimes committed against the people of Israel and Palestine that have been attributed to a supposed failure of military intelligence on 7th October last year. Or maybe it’s simply that I’m the wrong kind of Jew – the kind who asks questions. The ‘true Torah’ kind, not the Hellenising kind. Regardless of the reason, it’s not a good look for an organisation that declares a commitment to Jewish values.
Although I’d been excluded from the conference, I did watch on the livestream the keynote speech by current leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer, in which he stated that ‘the politics of division don’t help the Jewish community.’ I found this a tad ironical in the circumstances.
Thank you for this brilliant evisceration of the Jewish Labour Movement’s flouting of Jewish values, Andrew. Congratulations on having made a significant enough impact to be branded for wrongthink! 🏆
• “Letter to a Mainstream Straddler: Live Not by Half-Lies”: https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-mainstream-straddler
I would be curious to read an article by you on the recent World Court ruling indicating the allegations that Israel is committing genocide are plausible:
• https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240126-ord-01-00-en.pdf
• https://husseini.substack.com/p/world-court-orders-israel-to-abide
I respect your nuanced view on this topic but find your statement that “a state intent upon genocide would not warn its enemies in advance to evacuate the areas it’s about to attack” insufficient to counter the arguments that Israel has violated the Genocide Convention. I trust you to objectively evaluate the claims and perhaps recalibrate your position if you feel the evidence merits it.
Yes, the wrong kind of Jew must be the one who keeps asking questions. So all the more reason to keep asking them. Onwards!