Dictating to the diaspora

We're used to the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) making belligerent declarations of where it stands and where it claims all British Jews stand on important matters. But just a few hours before Rosh Hashona (Jewish New Year) started last Friday evening, they quietly posted on X an international statement that they and Britain’s unelected “Jewish Leadership Council” signed up to, called the “J50 Declaration on Zionism and Antisemitism”, along with similar Jewish establishment bodies in around 40 countries.

It says very little about actual antisemitism, which is undoubtedly rising in Britain and many countries alongside all manner of hatreds against other minorities, especially against black and brown minorities and refugees. It says nothing about the far right, ultra-nationalist movements driving hate against minorities globally.

The J50 declaration is a one-dimensional statement that focuses on defence of Jewish territorial nationalism – Zionism – (currently pursued in its most aggressive form by Israel's fascist-inclusive government and its military). The J50 forum, which adopted the statement this month at its third gathering in Jerusalem, was created by Israel’s Foreign Minister. 

Its target is anti-Zionism.

It makes the specious claim that anti-Zionism denies Jewish people their right to self-determination and therefore is antisemitic. It claims Zionism as an eternal part of Jewish history and identity, when political Zionism was only created in 1897 at a conference in Basle.

There was a lot of Jewish history before then. Even the BoD was created as far back as 1760, predating by 137 years the birth of political Zionism. In the years between 1897 and the Second World War, the BoD was led mainly by upper-middle/upper class Jews who defined themselves as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Most working-class Jews then were indifferent to Zionism or opposed it.

Those earlier Jewish leaders did not want a Jewish nationalism that would conflict with their loyalty to Britain. A number of them expressed the view that Zionism threatened to undermine their rights as a minority community here.

Maybe they will now be called retrospective antisemites by the J50 signatories.

Britain's Chief Rabbi in 1897 was asked at the time what he thought of the first Zionist Congress. He dismissed it as “an egregious error”. I suspect the current far-right incumbent, Rabbi Mirvis, who did a big chunk of his rabbinical training in a seminary in the Occupied Palestinian Territories would disagree.

The truth is, as established by Jewish Policy Research, the leading and widely respected polling body among Britain’s Jews, who use large and sophisticated samples, that 46% of Jews under 30 in Britain define themselves today as non-Zionist (22%) or anti-Zionist (24%).

Do those 46% deny the right of Jews to self-determination? Not at all. They practise their self-determination as Jews every day in Britain in the same way as their diasporic counterparts do in the more than 100 countries where Jews live as communities in various continents.

They simply don't identify with the narrow, ethno-nationalist version of Jewish self-determination in a fortress state: a state that was built on dispossessing and expelling so many Palestinians in 1948, which denies full self-determination to those who remained, and also rules brutally over more than 3 million Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank Territories.

In signing up to this narrow, right-wing Zionist, J50 statement, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council are declaring open hostility against that 46% whom they effectively regard as subscribing to antisemitism.

The J50 statement explicitly invokes the much-criticised IHRA definition of antisemitism, which even its original author, Kenneth Stern, has effectively disowned.

Nearly 80 years after Israel was created, and 75 years after the first “Jerusalem Programme” was announced, which talked condescendingly of “ingathering the exiles” – they labelled Jews outside Israel as in “exile” – the majority of Jews still choose the diaspora. And the number of Israelis choosing to leave Israel permanently has shot up in recent years, far exceeding those who move to Israel. They too now choose diaspora.

Who needs to read all of this and understand it? Well, anyone with a serious concern with actual antisemitism and other racism, and combating it, but especially people working across the media and those who are leading political parties, who continue to defer to that narrow, unrepresentative, right-wing Jewish establishment when they want an opinion about Jewish experience and Jewish concerns. They need to be opening a dialogue with a much wider range of Jews who hold a wider set of opinions.

It must be clearer today than at any time since 1948 that the interests of diaspora Jews and the interests of fascistic Israeli state nationalism are diametrically opposed. So why keep talking and listening to those who want us to pretend otherwise?

Image: The poster is a call from the Jewish Socialist Bund, saying: "Here, where we live, that is our land."