Off for a few days. Back Monday the 19th.
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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Daniel Finkelstein in today’s Times – Left’s obsession with Zionism has history:
It’s a bore to discuss whether any given piece of anti-Zionism is antisemitic, since this distracts from considering whether something is, say, grotesque or stupid or extreme, all things you can be without being antisemitic. So, let’s just say the Greens have chosen to support a policy that endorses violence that will almost entirely be aimed at Jewish people, that makes going to synagogue a racist act deserving of harassment (they rejected an amendment exempting synagogue attendance) and that singles out the world’s one Jewish state for eradication, leaving half the world’s Jews defenceless. I will leave you to decide for yourself whether that is antisemitic.
The most important decision a political party can make is about who it doesn’t include. The most significant act of Nigel Farage’s political career was that people who wanted to work with the neofascist right couldn’t be part of Ukip. Neil Kinnock chose to expel Militant. The Greens allowed anyone in. They boast (and still boast) of all their new members. But they have, in fact, simply been overrun by hardcore far-left activists.
And Islamists. Never forget the Islamists.
The reason the nature of this takeover is so obvious is because of the topic they have chosen. Zionism. It is an obsession of the far left. It is always the issue they go to first and the one thing they can’t leave alone. I first started having to engage with this when I was in my twenties, while Zack Polanski was still at King David High School and Habonim Dror, and before he began his long march on Saint Petersburg.
Which of course leaves this question: why? Why is Zionism an obsession of the far left? And anyone who wants an answer to that question should try reading Gal Beckerman’s book When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.
The Marxist idea is to create one smooth, borderless world without religions or peoples or ethnic attachment. More generally this is naturally impossible to achieve through consent and can only be advanced by genocidal murder and deportation, which is exactly what Stalin attempted against the Poles (including my father). But internally there was a specific problem with the Jews. Thought to be the easiest to assimilate, Soviet Jews had begun, after the war, to find a voice and an allegiance. They were demanding to be allowed to live in Israel.
It might be worth mention here that the Marxist idea of one smooth, borderless world bears a grim resemblance to the Islamist idea of one smooth borderless world: the new caliphate.
To accede to this demand would have been to accept that Marxism was hollow and adherence to it only achieved by compulsion. It would be an acknowledgment that a perennially oppressed people didn’t see socialism as deliverance. It would have been the ultimate contradiction of the Marxist idea.
The socialists could not (and cannot) bear an actual plan providing real safety, in contrast with their fantasy protection which promises only spiritual and cultural erasure followed by murder.
So, as Beckerman relates, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union established a “Plan for Basic Organisational and Propaganda Measures Connected with the Situation in the Middle East and the Intensifying Struggle with Zionism”, and in accordance with the plan held a press conference in March 1970, just as the Soviet dissident movement got under way.
This is what the party had to say: “Every day brings new reports about the crimes of the Israeli military, reviving memories of the barbarity of Hitlerites. This aggression has become a component of the imperialist, neocolonialist plot directed against the people and progressive regimes of the Middle East and closely intertwining the interests of oil monopolies and international Zionist operations … Zionism has always expressed the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie. It has now reached the apogee in preaching national intolerance and hatred. Zionists supply imperialism with cannon fodder in the struggle against the Arab people.”
Is any of this sounding familiar?…
A message, explicitly and deliberately created as Soviet propaganda (this is simply historical fact), has now found its moment and its audience in the Green Party. A terrible war has provided political fuel. And parts of the Muslim community have provided a voting base. This may be why, despite a similar affront to the Marxist principle of borderless secular societies, the Greens did not pass a motion condemning the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
The Greens have lost their party. And they aren’t going to get it back. This is who they are now.
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There was a reception for delegates this evening at the Department of Foreign Affairs. Maurice Cohen of the Irish Jewish Representative Council told the delegates and other guests that he had booked 70 rooms at the Herbert Park Hotel for delegates. But once the hotel discovered what the event was for, they cancelled the booking asking if the conference had a connection to the IDF. (It doesn’t, and what a bizarre question to ask). How deeply ironic that this should happen to delegates attending a conference dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism. What this does say about today’s Ireland? Nothing good. This story is eminently newsworthy. Journalists should contact Maurice Cohen. (The hotel should be sued).
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Hen Massig on the Free Palestine censorship campaign against “Zionists”:
At Northwestern University last week, a play that showcases the testimonies of October 7th survivors and victims was meant to be staged. The performance had barely begun when someone pulled the fire alarm. The piercing sound drowned out the voices of the actors onstage. They were speaking the words of the Nova concertgoers, taken verbatim from their testimony, young people who had also been forced to flee when missile sirens cut short the performance they were attending.
The auditorium had to be evacuated. Among the attendees were Abby Polin, the aunt of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Hersh’s grandmother was there, too.
I doubt anyone reading this essay is surprised that Free Palestine protesters disrupted events, and disgraced victims’ memories. This disgusting behavior has become normalized since October 8th, when pro-Hamas rallies were held in cities across the world.
But their desire for censorship extends beyond memorializing victims of the Hamas massacre to representation of any Israelis, at all.
Last week, a queer film festival in Geneva decided not to screen Tell Me Everything, a story about a young boy discovering his father is queer and the evolution of their relationship. Tell Me Everything is Israel’s Oscar contender for this year. As reported by Variety, the queer festival started receiving threats from a Palestinian film festival in Geneva. “They started writing messages like ‘We’re going to boycott your festival’ — boycott, boycott, just boycott,” said one of the queer festival organizers. Both the Palestinian film festival and the queer film festival receive city funds, which brings up the question of whether the censorship is even legal.
Scrambling to satisfy the demands of the potential boycotters, the festival asked filmmaker Moshe Rosenthal to “declare his stance towards the current Israeli government.” He did. He said that he does not support the government, he does not finance the government’s policies, and he does not make films that promote the policies of the Israeli government.
“The cancellation isn’t related to the film itself, but to the desire to avoid controversy just days before the festival’s opening,” said the queer festival’s artistic coordinator in a statement to the press. “Six days [out] from the festival they made the decision they wanted to not get into this kind of heated argument. It was a way of saying we’re all coming together, we need to come together,” said another coordinator.
On October 8, 2023, thousands gathered in New York and Sydney not to mourn, but to celebrate. They cheerfully chanted the mounting death count of a massacre that was ongoing, while Israelis and Jews around the world scrambled to locate kidnapped and murdered loved ones. Three years later, on October 8, 2026, a film festival in Switzerland decided that caving to the mob was the safer option, the one that would allow everyone to “come together.”
It’s almost like they’re not concerned about what these people believe when they ban them: it’s just because they’re Jews. Not the far right in action here, not neo-Nazis. Lovely progressive people. Everyone comes together…except the Jews.
Back at the auditorium at Northwestern University, where someone pulled the fire alarm to stop audience members from hearing October 7th survivor testimony, the show wasn’t over. The police investigated, and when approval was given, hundreds of the attendees returned inside to view the rest of the performance.
It received a standing ovation. Not a planned one, timed to last exactly long enough to break a record and make global headlines. A genuine one, made by people who have been told repeatedly that our pain doesn’t matter. We refuse to disappear.
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An open letter from military experts – 13 Generals, 27 Lieutenant Generals, 19 Major Generals, 5 Brigadier Generals – “refuting genocide allegations against Israel”:
Added:
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Laura Freeman in the Times – Has Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall had its day?
An item for the agenda of the incoming Tate director Jessica Morgan: sort out the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Take the commissioning committee by the scruff of the neck and remind them that here is one of the great public art spaces of the world. It calls for scale, spectacle, something to make you say “Cor!” as you come through the doors.
Enough with mimsy mobiles hanging from gantries, enough with remote communities and climate anxiety. Give us something to remember. We do still recall Anish Kapoor’s trumpet (Marsyas), Olafur Eliasson’s sun (The Weather Project), Carsten Höller’s slides (Test Site) and Doris Salcedo’s crack (Shibboleth), but they were 24, 23, 20 and 19 years ago respectively. Get across the message: go big or go back to the drawing board.
Yes, absolutely. Though I’d strongly disagree with the inclusion of Doris Salcedo’s ridiculous Shibboleth as one of the efforts worth recalling. [I wrote about it at the time – though due to factors beyond my control the layout now makes it impossible to distinguish what I wrote from what Tate Modern had to say. Anyway, I didn’t like it.]
On the latest effort:
The latest Turbine Hall commission was unveiled on Monday morning. Tarek Atoui’s Hold, a “multisensory installation”, is the 25th Turbine Hall commission and the 11th under the sponsorship of Hyundai. It is not a success. Atoui, born in Lebanon and based in Paris, has produced a work that is visually fiddly and portentously orchestrated. The aesthetic is steampunk meets gong bath. Instruments, some complete, some makeshift, are suspended on wires alongside various unappealing vents and grates….
It is a thin, mannered, cluttered commission and a waste of a magnificent space. But then so was the last one (Maret Anne Sara’s pick-up-sticks palisade Goavve-Geabbil) and the one before that (Mire Lee’s stomach-churning Open Wound). El Anatsui’s mighty sails and shoals were better, but it has been a long time since there was a “whoa!” moment, still less a Höller “whee!” one.
It’s perhaps less of a comment on the Tate Modern commissioners and more of an issue with the lack of ambition or vision in the current art world, where ideological concerns – and the requirement for paragraphs of explicatory text – so often seem to dominate over talent. If ever there was a site where visual power and immediate impact was required it would be the cavernous Turbine Hall – but they just can’t do it.
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Added: Stephen Pollard in the Spectator.
The yiddish word chutzpah is often defined as when a man who has murdered both his parents pleads for clemency on the grounds that he is an orphan. But there’s now a better definition. On Monday, Ed Miliband posted this on social media: “Antisemitism has no place in our society. This morning, I hosted a crucial discussion with the J7 Global Task Force to discuss how we can work together across countries to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism.”
Give the man his due. Miliband is certainly not troubled by an excess of self-doubt, let alone shame. In the 85 days in which he has been Foreign Secretary, Miliband has done more to worsen the situation for British Jews than any other minister of any party in living memory. There is no other minister or ex-minister who is worse placed to opine on the scourge of antisemitism than the man who has done the bidding of Jew haters across the country by imposing sanctions on Israel. (And that’s without even considering his appalling legacy as Labour leader, which can be spelled out in two words: Jeremy Corbyn. It was Miliband’s change to Labour’s leadership election rules which handed the post to Corbyn.)…
Miliband behaves as if he wants to be seen as the ‘good Jew’, the Jew who doesn’t empathise with Israel and who does what the Israel-haters wants. It might work for a while for him. But the Jew haters, led by the sectarian Muslims whose votes Miliband wants to get back for Labour, have already banked the sanctions as a win and are demanding more. They will keep doing so. As the Green party leader Zack Polanski is finding out, as a Jewish politician you can only ride the Jew hate horse for so long before they turn on you when you are no longer useful.
A minister who treats the Jewish state as a pariah gives Jew haters what they want. Even better if that minister is himself Jewish. Miliband’s regurgitation of Hamas propaganda and his imposition of sanctions shows everyone that Israel is regarded as the villain of the Middle East. It is sickening that the minister most responsible for worsening antisemitism should claim to have any interest in combatting it.
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The money. Always the money.