I am a philo-semite. The disproportionate Jewish contribution to western civilisation— not least to science and the arts — is one of the most astonishing achievements of modern history. I am also an anti-anti-semite. The murder and mayhem perpetrated by anti- semites throughout history, and above all in the 20th century, deserves its special place in the annals of infamy.
I’d assumed anti-semitism had no place in British life, aside from the odious antics of skinheads on the fringes of the far right. There are therefore few things that depress me more than the resurfacing of anti-semitism on the British left, and not on its fringes.
In an interview on BBC London last week, the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, claimed that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism — this before he went mad and ended up killing 6m Jews.”
It turns out that Livingstone’s source for this claim is a book entitled Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by the self-proclaimed American Trotskyist Lenni Brenner. This is not a book cited in scholarly works, not least because Brenner is not a scholar but a political activist. (At an anti-Israel meeting in Berlin, Connecticut, he said that Jews who made political donations were as “crooked as a dog’s hind leg”.) Far more reliable accounts exist of the contacts between the Nazi regime and certain Zionists that led to the 1933 Havaara Agreement, which allowed German Jews to transfer property from Germany to Palestine, then a British-controlled “mandate”.
Some Nazi officials did indeed favour emigration as the “solution to the Jewish question”. But Livingstone’s claim that this was Hitler’s preferred option is simply wrong. As early as 1919 Hitler stated that he saw the Jews as “the racial tuberculosis of peoples”. In a speech he gave in April 1920 he called for them “to be exterminated”. In Mein Kampf he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] war and during the war 12 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”
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Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were therefore not voting for a Zionist resettlement programme. At a torchlit parade on February 6, 1933, in Hamburg 20,000 brownshirts chanted: “Death to the Jews,” and — according to one eyewitness — “sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives”.
This latest controversy is, of course, not really about the history of 1930s Germany, but about the much more recent history of the British Labour party. Since the late 1960s — the era when both Livingstone and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, joined the party — a significant element of the British left has aligned itself with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and other groups hostile to Israel.
“Livingstone and Corbyn are the useful idiots of a new generation of Labour infiltrators
Close to half a century of anti-Zionist rhetoric lies behind Livingstone’s complaint that “there’s been a very well- orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-semitic”.
This is why Corbyn dithered last week before acquiescing to Livingstone’s suspension. It also helps explain Corbyn’s defiant assertion “that much of this criticism . . . about a ‘crisis’ in the party actually comes from those who are nervous of the strength of the Labour party at local level”. Whom did he mean? True Labour supporters who see both him and Livingstone as Trotskyists hellbent on hijacking their party? Or some other group?
Yet Livingstone and Corbyn are no longer the devious “entryists” of their militant early years. Rather, they have become the useful idiots of an entirely new generation of Labour infiltrators.
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Remember: Livingstone’s comments were made in defence of two 2014 Facebook posts by Naseem (“Naz”) Shah, who became the Labour MP for Bradford West last year. One stated: “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict — relocate Israel into United States. Problem solved.” The other explicitly equated “apartheid Israel” with Hitler’s Germany.
“Naz was not anti-semitic,” insisted Livingstone last week. “She was completely over the top, very rude, but that does not make her an anti-semite . . . A real anti-semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel; they hate their Jewish neighbours in Golders Green or Stoke Newington; it’s a physical loathing.”
Let’s leave aside the implication that it’s fine with Red Ken to “hate the Jews in Israel”, as long as some of your best friends in England are Jewish. Let’s instead consider why Shah was systematically using the Palestinian issue to mobilise voters.
It is not that Shah is herself an Islamist. If she were, I doubt she would appear with her head uncovered in the House of Commons. It is just that bashing Israel appears to be an effective way of mobilising Muslim voters, who account for roughly half the electorate in Bradford West. Nor is Bradford the only place in Britain where this goes on.
“The real issue is Labour’s dangerous flirtation with a new and very different generation of anti-semites
It was a difficult week for Sadiq Khan, the MP for Tooting, who is also the Labour candidate in next Thursday’s mayoral election in London. Khan lost no time in distancing himself from the last Labour mayor, condemning Livingstone’s comments as “appalling and inexcusable”. Yet Khan has done a few inexcusable things of his own.
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In September 2004, for example, he attended a meeting under the banner “Palestine — the suffering still goes on”, hosted by Friends of al-Aqsa and the Tooting Islamic Centre. Invitations said “all welcome”, but a sign at the door made it clear that the sexes would be segregated.
Other speakers included Daud Abdullah, then deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, who in 2009 signed the Istanbul declaration in support of Hamas’s “victory” in the “malicious Jewish Zionist war over Gaza”; the preacher Ibrahim Hewitt, whose book What Does Islam Say? likens homosexuals to paedophiles; and the academic Azzam Tamimi, who two months after the Tooting meeting told the BBC that sacrificing his life for justice for the Palestinians would be “a noble cause . . . the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity”. Also on the platform was the Tooting imam Suliman Gani, whom the prime minister has named in the Commons as a supporter of Isis.
Khan has argued that he attended this meeting in his capacity as a human rights lawyer, but he was in fact billed as a “Labour parliamentary candidate”. And this (if polls are to be believed) is the next mayor of London?
Forced last week to face its own long-standing problem with anti-semitism, Labour is frantically trying to turn the tables by accusing David Cameron and the Tory mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith of “Islamophobia”. But the real issue is Labour’s dangerous flirtation with a new and very different generation of anti-semites. Trotskyists and Islamists make strange bedfellows, to be sure. But perhaps only slightly stranger than the anti-Marxists and German racial theorists who together created National Socialism.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford