Israeli scholar Jeff Halper, a veteran peace activist, has documented in great detail in his book War Against the People how Israel has intentionally positioned itself at the heart of a growing "global pacification industry". The thousands of training sessions held by Israeli police in the US and around the world are based on their "expertise" in repressive, militarised policing.
Tiny Israel has influence in this field way out of proportion to its size, in the same way that it is one of the top 10 states - all the others far larger - that profit from the arms trade and cyber warfare. Every year since 2007, the Global Militarisation Index has crowned Israel the most militarised nation on the planet.
A senior analyst at the liberal Israeli Haaretz newspaper has described Israel as "securityland" - the go-to state for others to improve their techniques for surveilling, controlling and oppressing restive populations within their territory. It is this expertise in "securocratic warfare" that, according to Halper, has allowed tiny Israel to hit way above its weight in international politics and earned it a place "at the table with NATO countries".
Western bad faithIt is on this last point that the Labour left, including many of the party's half a million members, and the Labour right decisively part company. A gulf in worldviews opens up.
Along with the climate emergency, Israel symbolises for the Labour left some of the most visible hypocrisies and excesses of a neoliberal global agenda that treats the planet with slash-and-burn indifference, views international law with contempt, and regards populations as little more than pawns on an updated colonial chessboard.
Israel's recent history of dispossessing the Palestinians; its unabashed promotion of Jim Crow-style ethnic privileges for Jews, epitomised in the nation-state law; its continuing utter disregard for the rights of Palestinians; its hyper-militarised culture; its decades-long occupation; its refusal to make peace with its neighbours; its deep integration into the West's war industries; its influence on the ideologies of the "war on terror" and a worldwide "clash of civilisations"; and its disdain for international humanitarian law are all anathema to the left.
Worse still, Israel has been doing all of this in full view of the international community for decades. Nonetheless, its crimes are richly subsidised by the United States and Europe, as well as obscured by a sympathetic western media that is financially and ideologically embedded in the neoliberal establishment.
For the Labour left - for Peake, Long-Bailey and Corbyn - Israel is such an obvious example of western bad faith, such a glaring Achilles' heel in the deceptions spread on behalf of the neoliberal order, that it presents an opportunity. Criticism of Israel can serve to awaken others, helping them to understand how a bogus western "civilisation" is destroying the planet through economic pillage, wars and environmental destruction.
It offers an entry into the left's structural, more abstract critiques of capitalism and western colonialism that it is otherwise difficult to convey in soundbites to a uniformly hostile media.
Antisemitism redefinedThe problem is that the stakes regarding Israel are understood by the Labour right in much the same way. Their commitment to a global neoliberal order - one they characterise in terms of a superior western civilisation - stands starkly exposed in the case of Israel.
If the idea of Israel is made vulnerable to challenge, so might their other self-delusions and deceptions about western superiority.
For each side, Israel has become a battleground on which the truthfulness of their worldview is tested.
The Labour right has no desire to engage with the left's arguments, particularly at a time when the climate emergency and the rise of populism make their political claims sound increasingly hollow. Rather than debate the merits of democratic socialism, the Labour right has preferred to simply tar the Labour left as antisemites.
With Corbyn's unexpected rise to lead Labour in 2015, that crisis for the Labour right became existential. The backlash was swift and systematic.
The party's right-wing scrapped the accepted definition of antisemitism and imposed a new one on Labour, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), to ensnare the left. It focused on criticism of Israel rather than hatred or fear of Jews.
The Jewish Labour Movement, a pro-Israel group, was revived in late 2015 to undermine Corbyn from within the party. It was all but sanctified, even as it refused to campaign for Labour candidates and referred the party to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for a highly politicised investigation.
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