The Soviet Union Is Long Gone, but Soviet-Style Anti-Semitism Thrives in Britain

Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the British Labor party, has for his entire career been a committed apologist for the USSR, and belonged to that segment of the British left that took its cues from Moscow. Thus, writes Ben Cohen, it should be no surprise that his attitudes toward Israel and Jews, and those of his defenders, seem to come straight out of Soviet propaganda:

For much of its existence, the Morning Star, Britain’s Communist newspaper, was a slave of the Soviet Union. Old habits die hard, it seems—an editorial in the paper this week that attacked the “Jewish establishment” for allegedly scheming to bring down Corbyn was horribly reminiscent of the kind of screed about “Zionists” that was once daily fodder in the Soviet press. . . . The article . . . quoted a Jewish left-winger who ventured in all seriousness that Britain’s Jewish leaders are committed to “censorship and outlawing views other than their own.” . . . “Labor’s enemies, including its most embittered fifth column, have tasted blood,” the article concluded, “and won’t end their attacks until Corbyn is hung out to dry.”

[In 1977, by analogy, there was] a slew of Soviet newspaper articles with headlines like “The Espionage Octopus of Zionism,” replete with wild claims that will probably be familiar to many British Labor-party social-media activists—for example, that U.S. oil companies “are directly controlled by pro-Zionist capital.” Most of all, there was the Soviet practice of wheeling out “citizens of Jewish nationality” to denounce Zionism as a “racist” tool of “imperialism.” . . .

Corbyn himself was present at dozens of left-wing political gatherings during the 1970s and 80s where Soviet and Arab anti-Semitic literature was distributed, [and when] Corbyn and those in his camp speak and write about the triangle of Jews, Zionism, and Israel, these are the terms in which they think, and have always thought.

That is why [the Morning Star], Corbyn’s house journal, uses terms like “embittered fifth column” to describe their leader’s Jewish opponents—also used by Valery Emelyanov, an official Soviet ideologue, in 1978 to describe the “internal danger” posed by Soviet Jews. It’s why they have no qualms about saying that Jewish leaders opposed to Corbyn have “tasted blood,” despite the associations with the anti-Semitic blood libel that such a metaphor unleashes; then again, Vladimir Begun, a particularly toxic Soviet anti-Semite, wrote with great enthusiasm of the “bloodthirstiness” that was inherent in “Zionist gangsterism.”

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Jeremy Corbyn, Labor Party (UK), Politics & Current Affairs, Soviet Union, United Kingdom

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF