Mikey:

For those people who have not followed the oddities of these small fringe outfits and the factional problems that have developed in the anti-Zionist movement, this whole debate must be particularly confusing.

On the one hand you have "Jews against Zionism" being accused of being Zionist by Gilad Atzmon. On the other hand you have Jews against Zionism accusing both Gilad Atzmon of antisemitism and people at Engage of antisemitism as according to Tony Greenstein of Jews against Zionism, Zionists are the real antisemites. You have people at Engage accusing both Jews against Zionism and Gilad Atzmon of antisemitism and finally you have both Gilad Atzmon and Jews against Zionism defending themselves against charges of antisemitism.

I left this sort of factional lunacy behind 30 years ago when I left the UK for Israel where I have been living happily ever after. I am still surprised that the same hacks are still around 30 years later.

What this story lacks is a historical perspective. It was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that at one point or another that the Jewish anti-Zionists would be booted out by their comrades. I would refer to two historical parallels.

The first is the role of the Jewish Communists in Russia and later in Eastern Europe under Stalin. We Jews were among the most vociferous supporters of the Communist revolution. However, we were never the majority and as soon as we had served our purpose we were isolated and eliminated. Literally.

The second parallel is that of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula during the Reconquista in the later Middle Ages. Initially the Jews played an important role in resettling Spain. After the Muslim Almohades had decimated the Jews they found refuge and cooperated with the Christians. After the pogroms of 1391 which were instigated by Ferdinand Martinez, canon of the cathedral of Seville, a third of the Jewish population of the Iberian Peninsula was murdered and a third forcibly converted. This oppression continued until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. However, those Jews who had converted, voluntarily or forcibly, were continually looked down on and referred to as "New Christians".

There are other parallels too. It just goes to show that we Jews never learn and always think that we know better. We know better than other Jews and we know much better than non Jews, especially if we are opposing the position of the vast majority of Jews.

Poor Greenstein.

After almost 30 years of taking the most outrageous and offensive positions, he's now been outdone by the new, sexier kid on the block. It was inevitable. The pornography of Jewish anti-Zionism demanded it.

Greenstein was 'only' willing to go as far saying "Look at me, I'm a Jew and I say that Zionism = Nazism". This was bad enough to get him censored at NUS where the poor delicate students couldn't handle such XXX rated stuff.

Now, however, we live in a harsher age, where the audience demands more of its performers. Atzmon goes the extra mile and does so without the need for philosemitic prophylactics. No wonder his SWP and PSC audiences love him. "Give us more" they demand, and he delivers.

And now Greenstein wants to be the censor. No chance. There is no cutting room floor, and there's no more censors.

. . . . Greenstein/Rance/Elf have just experienced two things that Zionist Jews have known for many years:

Firstly, that most non-Jewish anti-Zionists simply do not care about antisemitism, or at least not enough to allow opposition to it to obstruct their anti-Zionist activities; Secondly, that whenever anyone raises the issue, the default reaction of most non-Jewish anti-Zionists is to accuse them of doing so for cynical political reasons, rather than because they are genuinely worried about antisemitism.

As much as it is tempting to enjoy seeing Greenstein/Rance/Elf on the receiving end of the same kind of language and methods that they have used to attack the mainstream Jewish community for so many years, there is no satisfaction in seeing open antisemites win a political debate in any context.

Jewish anti-Zionists have just been reminded that their welcome in the anti-Zionist movement is conditional on their ability to put to one side their specifically Jewish perspective, unless they use it as a platform from which to bash Zionist Jews. Or in other words, they are outsiders by virtue of their Jewishness, even in the anti-Zionist world that they have inhabited for their entire political lives. Atzmon and Shamir have only overcome this by publicly renouncing their Jewishness; Shamir has even gone so far as to convert to Christianity. The gatekeepers have just arrived home to find squatters have changed the locks. There is another thing that is true, but that Greenstein/Rance/Elf may not yet have remembered: there will always be a place for them in the Jewish world, where their membership is not conditional on anything. Even the wicked son has a role in the Haggadah.

I don't know what Greenstein, Rance et al will do now.

I mean, they must realise that their future in the PSC is basically over. As one of the commentators on PeacePalestine puts it, they're just a handful of blokes sitting around a pub table. Their isolation is complete, and their credibility - and therefore their political careers - are over.

There are many ironies here, some of which are alluded to above.

Another one is that their fate mirrors the accusation they make about "the Zionists" and the Nazis in WWII.

Greenstein and Rance tried to make a deal with a racist politics, and tried to convince themselves that all was for the best. Unsurprisingly it didn't work out.

I wonder what their response will be.

My money is on "We tried to alert them to the dangers of racism in the anti-Zionist movement. Unfortunately, the Zionists have cried wolf so many times that we weren't believed. We therefore blame the Zionists for our fate".

Sadly for them, the PSC knew exactly what they were doing. This wasn't an error by them. This was a choice.

This PSC vote - the manner of it as much as the result - and the anecdote from David Rosenberg reveal a process whereby the anti-Zionist movement is liberating itself from its Jewish figleaves. I suppose it's always exhilarating to be told that you no longer have to observe whatever political correctness had previously restricted your wilder thoughts and feelings. What is at first surprising but on second thoughts perhaps entirely necessary, is that this is a consequence of receiving permission from other Jews - the Atzmon/Eisen clique - to do so. Or to put it another way, where Greenstein and Rance kosherised the anti-Zionist discourse, Atzmon says "hey, you don't need to be kosher - you can eat treif!"

On this issue at least, Atzmon is becoming the intellectual leader for the UK anti-Zionist movement. Ironic that it is still being led by Jews, indulging in a spot of imperialism to work out their own personal identity issues.

It would be a mistake to dismiss this as irrelevant and fringe politics; PSC has some high-profile patrons and trade union supporters and I wouldn't assume that any of them will cut their ties no matter who or what PSC promotes. Paul Eisen publicly supports Ernst Zundel; Daniel McGowan, another DYR founder, recently visited Zundel in prison. This is no longer enough to ostracise them from the left, as it would have done in the past. How long till their support for a neo-Nazi Holocaust Denier receives a wider hearing?

Mark, you make a critically important point which is worth reiterating: "Atzmon and Eisen's anti-Zionism is not of the left wing variety". That's the most important difference. For years, Greenstein and co dressed up some very unpleasant anti-Semitic themes in the universalist language of revolutionary socialism. Revolutionary socialism is what kept him and his friends pure - in their own eyes at least. They believed, perhaps genuinely, that their rather bizarre fusion of class politics and Jewish anti-Zionist identity politics immunised them from anti-Semitism; indeed, that anti-Semitism was intelligible only on the right, as a creature of reaction and as an instrument of the ruling class.

Of course, as both Mark and Paul Bogdanor (I think) pointed out in earlier posts, back in the 70s the anti-Semitism was no less ambiguous and the moral sewer was no less fetid, at least to clear-eyed and clean-nosed observers. What, I wonder, was Greenstein's take on the decision of the Black September hijackers of the Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris, aided by German Red Army Faction terrorists, to separate the Jewish from the non-Jewish passengers upon landing at Entebbe Airport? Actually, I'm pretty confident I know the answer to that one...I guess that Greenstein felt safe as long as the rhetorical focus was on "Zionists" with lip service paid to the class struggle. Now Atzmon and Eisen have gone and spoiled it all by talking about Jews.

I think it's worth pointing that Atzmon and Greenstein share a common debt to the Soviet Union. "Jewish Power" and the malign Judaic essence are common concepts in Soviet anti-Zionism (Kichko, Skurlatov etc.) So is Zionist-Nazi collaboration and the denial of the Holocaust as a Jewish catastrophe - though not, it must be said, outright denial. So if Greenstein feels politically humiliated and bruised by his PSC comrades, he should bury his hubris and subject himself to some very critical self-examination.

As to Greenstein getting into scrapes with Nazis, he may well have done (so did I, so did many others posting here), but he did so mainly to reinforce his line that Zionists wouldn't. And that is really outrageous - after all, who is Greenstein to insult the memory and legacy of Mordechai Anielewicz, a socialist, a Zionist and the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising? Honestly, this guy doesn't even deserve accidental sympathy. And what the PSC conference has given us is a rare moment of clarity.