Blaming the victims

In Boris Pasternak's novel, Dr Zhivago, Zhivago's Jewish friend, Misha Gordon, has been thinking about anti-Semitism since he was a child. From his first appearance on a train, aged eleven, he raises the issue. It is only later in wartime after he has witnessed Zhivago stopping Cossacks harassing an elderly Jew, that he gives his considered conclusion.

Why didn't the intellectual leaders of the Jewish people ever go beyond facile Weltschmerz and ironical wisdom? Why have they not—even if at the risk of bursting like boilers with the pressure of their duty—disbanded this army which keeps on fighting and being massacred nobody knows for what? Why don't they say to them: 'Come to your senses, stop. Don't hold on to your identity. Don't stick together, disperse. Be with all the rest. You are the first and best Christians in the world. You are the very thing against which you have been turned by the worst and weakest among you. (Part 4, Chapter 12)

In this unpleasant, sneering post, Mike Sivier, blames accusations of anti-Semitism as the cause of anti-Semitism against Jewish Labour MPs. The MPs themselves "have created the fear of such attacks. Or, at least, they have made it possible ... to claim they fear such attacks." (Oh that last line. The accusation of dishonesty, of scheming ...).

They're the same thing. The victims brought it on themselves. Both examples use familiar formulations. They are persecuted because they had not recognised that the saviour was amongst them. They made themselves reviled by rejecting the true path. Embrace Christ or Corbyn and hostility will dissolve.

At least Pasternak's expression of Christian individualism has literary merit. Neither are true, however. The Nazis didn't care whether you were a convert, secular, or fully assimilated. Genealogy was enough to condemn you to an appalling death. Jew-hatred has longer, deeper roots.

Blaming victims is always a way to avoid moral responsibility. It is mental dishonesty and an excuse for inaction. The accusations of separateness and disloyalty here are common tropes that are levelled against the persecuted, especially by those doing the persecution.

This would be my three point plan to deal with Labour's anti-Semitism problem.

1. Admit that it exists.
2. Understand that in left circles it is expressed through an ahistorical and partisan account of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
3. Bloody do something about it!

Ironygate

There's enough being said on the main theme - Jeremy Corbyn's awful remarks at a fringe 'conference' of right-wing theocrats, conspiracy nutters, Jew-haters, and the like. There will be more to come, there are plenty of videos, compromising photos, and dubious statements as he has enthusiastically participated in many similar events over the decades of activism before he became Labour leader. Instead, I want to turn to his remarks on history.

When he spoke with real passion of the importance of history, of it being the one subject he would make compulsory for all children, I could cheer him on. When he sneered that certain Zionists should read it, I was less impressed. Especially as he then proceeded to absolutely butcher the history in two ways.

1. He used an inappropriate analogy. He compared the League of Nations mandates for the former Ottoman provinces to the Scramble for Africa. This is nonsense. These were Class A mandates where the mandatory power was given administrative authority over a territory for what we would now call nation building. The territories were to become independent as soon as practicable. Iraq gained independence in 1932, Lebanon in 1943, Syria and Transjordan gained full independence immediately after the Second World War. Palestine was more complicated as the mandate also supported the aims of the Balfour Declaration.

The system of mandates is certainly open to criticism, but it was not New Imperialism. To try and say it was is a device to create a convenient anti-imperialist narrative, simplifying the causes of the conflict as being down to malign British intentions.

2. He puts forward an unsupported supposition as historical fact. He asserted that Britain was trying to establish a permanent colony in Palestine and maintain it through divide and rule. The unspoken assumption being that Zionism was a tool of British imperialism. His evidence? The British constructed some nice buildings in West Jerusalem.

What could possibly contradict such an overwhelming case? Perhaps the mountains of documentary evidence would do. Maybe the White Papers and the commissions of inquiry would be a pointer. All show the British looking to find a way out of an intractable problem, while they also display the policy conflict between a firmly Arabist Foreign Office, determined to secure British influence in the Middle East, with politicians trying to balance security concerns with a commitment to Jewish settlement. The pragmatists were pro-Arab. The politicians were seeking a compromise. The evidence for a conspiratorial plot is non-existent.

It's odd, I've seen this argument before. It's in Menachem Begin's memoir of the Irgun's struggle against the British, "The Revolt." He claimed in the book that the British wanted to turn Palestine into a permanent colony and to do so they stirred up the enmity of the Arabs against the Jews. This would ensure that Britain had to remain to police a conflict they were causing. Divide and rule, it's the same argument. It seems that however long you live in Islington you can't quite get historical irony.

There are a couple of interesting observations that come from this. The first is that Begin's Revisionist Zionism and Corbyn's anti-Zionism share a similar conspiratorial mindset. They both wish to shift the blame for the conflict onto a manipulative outside power. It's a way of avoiding responsibility. This isn't healthy scepticism, nor is it good history.

The second is more important. History is a poor servant of a cause. Those devoted to one don't need history, they need a justificatory narrative. History will not do that. It may condemn errors and stand witness against evil. But it also searches for an objective truth, even if it proves elusive. It raises complexities and contradictions. It is uncomfortable with simplification. This is why historians should never go to the cinema.

What Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and the like are doing is using pseudo-history to support a pre-determined conclusion. I can often see the same on the other side of the conflict too. But this isn't to say that history has no role to play. We don't need to forget the past; we need to try and understand it. In this case, history can tell us about the experiences and perceptions of both parties to the conflict. It legitimates both sides, even if it condemns many of their actions. A solution - peace - comes from that mutual affirmation, rather than the negation that Corbyn seems so keen on.

Where we are and who we were

We cannot escape our history or our geography. We can forget it though. The Mail is studiously practised in amnesia. I want to remember instead, to remember where we were when Britain joined what was to become the European Union.

Britain had lost it's empire. It was still a power, but not one of the major ones. Any illusion of independence had disappeared after Suez. It was a bi-polar world, divided between two military superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain had been instrumental in committing America to the defence of Europe with the post-war Labour government's construction of NATO. Economically, Britain was in relative decline with deep structural weaknesses. It faced an economic and strategic dilemma. Europe or America? This was a choice to be made. There was no independence option. The Commonwealth wasn't a new empire that could keep the imperial show going. The choice was obvious. Geography and history determined it.

Britain's foremost strategic interest lay in Europe, as it still does. It had fought two world wars in Europe in the twentieth century, and many others in previous centuries to prevent the continent being dominated by a single hostile power. The European Union began as a peace project as much as an economic one. This is why Churchill was an enthusiast for the creation of a united states of Europe. The Franco German alliance was the centrepiece, as it was the conflict between these two powers that lay at the heart of the European catastrophe. By taking their place in this new community, West Germany gratefully accepted the restraints on its power as a way of atoning for its history. The EU remains a voluntary brake on German power, not a vehicle for its exercise. And as the European economy began expanding and outstripping Britain, our inclusion became imperative. Britain's integration into the European economic framework laid the basis for the reversal of our relative decline.

So where are we today? There is only one military superpower now, the USA. But the world is more or less tri-polar, split between three economic superpowers - America, China, and the European Union. Britain has played a critical role in creating the EU's status, driving through the single market and supporting expansion. And there Britain stood, one of the 'big three' (with France and Germany), the group of the most powerful nations determining the future of the Union. Now it has decided to abdicate its pre-eminent position in favour of ... what? Who knows? It is an act of historic folly.

Though time moves on, the past lingers in the shadows. A confident younger generation embraced a European future, but the old fantasies - independence, imperial greatness, choosing America over Europe - were still there and were promoted by small groups of obsessives on the left and right. Amongst general apathy, they made such a nuisance of themselves within the Conservative Party that Cameron tried to silence them by the astonishing decision to give them their heart's desire, a referendum. He gave them a referendum that was poorly planned and structured, lacking in preparation, surrounded by constitutional ambiguity, and with a curious franchise that included neither all residents nor all citizens. With much mendacity and a fair bit of illegality, they exploited their opportunity brilliantly to win a tiny majority to leave.

I suppose the one irony of Brexit is that it has created something that has never existed before. Europe had been a topic of little salience and much indifference. But now there is a fervently pro-European movement which is capable of bringing hundreds of thousands out on the streets to protest, in contrast to the few hundred (at best) that Leavers can muster. If we do leave, then this movement will be needed. At some stage we will have to rejoin. We will be weaker, poorer, and will not get anything like as favourable terms, but we will need to. History and geography makes it inevitable.