Britain's political chaos is not unique. Britain's crisis has its own character that dissolves any shreds of the idea that it remains the world's most politically stable country. But Britain's political woes share, with the rest of the West, the general impact of the end of post WW2 styles of regimes. Many governments in the West are more different in their character than at any time since the early 1950s.
Alteration is an obvious feature of the ex Soviet European countries. New change is less immediately obvious in some other European countries because they have been built on a foundation of uncertainty since 1945. (See Spain and Franco; Greece and the Colonels and now the EU; Portugal and its revolution; Italy, with its long-term failure of centralisation and now its vulnerable borders.) Such historic malfunctions can mask the West's new shift in those particular countries. The new crisis of the West is more obvious in what are often called the most 'successful' Western countries; Germany, France, Britain, Sweden the Netherlands and, of course, the US. While all sorts of catch-all phrases bubble up from the modern media's hysteria - the rise of populism, the clash of civilisations, the revival of the nation, the revolt of the 'left behind' etc., - the substance of the West's series of political shocks lies in the decline of its global domination and the reorganisation of the capitalist system. That has meant a drastic decline in living standards for 700 million people.
This shock has started to cause more than a tremor in what used to be understood as political certainties.
For example, the Economist magazine recently featured an article about the current French situation.
'The level of publicly expressed loathing harks back to the 1930s' was the bi-line of a piece that shuddered with alarm at the emergence of a new 'peoples fascism' and an end of the steady political 'centre'. This has been a mainstream political theme in the French media in the last 3 years. And French cultural concerns regularly reflect the break up of the standard political parties in France as a critical weakness.
Part of the political responses made by the Macron regime to all this, (his party is without any deep social base or historic baselines) smells more of fear, desperation and a return to backward myths than radical and responsive policy.
Poorly thought out efforts were made to smooth over France's 'mood' last July when the French National Assembly, under Macron's control, unanimously voted to remove the word 'race' from the French constitution. A similar, drastic error occurred on February 21st 2019, when Macron, trying to tarnish the 'Yellow Vests' movement as a whole, said there was a 'resurgence of anti-Semitism unseen since World War II,' which he continued is not only happening in France but in 'all of Europe and most Western democracies.' Macron then explosively added that 'anti-Zionism is one of the modern forms of anti-semitism.'
First, an ostensibly anti-racist measure designed to deny the existence of race in the definition of what constitutes French citizens - to 'prove' the 'egalite' of all of the French nation - turned (of course) into its exact opposite. Anti-racists and feminists exploded. In theory the French constitution explains who it is that constitutes the nation. In France, theoretically, the nation is anybody who lives in the nation's boundary. But the removal of the 'race' clause from the constitution is so important because different classes, and races, and sexes, are all critical in and for the social system that the world, including the French world, lives under. Their absence as specific groups in the definition of the 'Nation' is, in effect, a denial of the reality of their distinct existence and therefore of their oppression. Shared nationality does not of itself solve that oppression. On the contrary, it assumes equality due to its 'Frenchness', and thereby denies it in a capitalist, social and economic reality, in the handling of the police, the courts, employment, housing, in the main engine room of society and of life.
The French National Assembly therefore took a step backward several centuries to defend France from the struggles fighting for progress and real equality.
Second, attacks on Jewish people and their institutions across Europe have been rising steadily. While still far behind the waves of official and unofficial racist attacks against Muslims in general, North Africans, Syrians, Turks and Roma, the Jewish diaspora across Europe felt relatively settled and secure after the defeat of Fascism in 1945, yet they are now under fire again. Like the people of West Indian heritage in Britain, (in their case dramatically attacked by the British Home Office) they have suddenly found themselves once more at risk and once more in the front line of racism.
The British Prime Minister, Teresa May (who led the Home Office offensive against Britain's Caribbean citizens) and President Macron, who is redefining the character of his nation and laying down stupid laws, are typical of the new set of European (and US) leaders, out of their depth and full of Canute like efforts to roll back the tide. In effect their (and others) efforts are actually stoking fascist responses. In the case of May and Trump, deliberately legitimising them to provide new political levers.
Which brings us to Macron (and various British Labour MP's) versions of Zionism.
Macron's description and his consequent defence of Zionism maybe stoked as much by ignorance as cynicism. In British politics, the national focus of anti-semitic hostility centres on Corbyn's Labour Party and is largely political. Corbyn's Labour Party is one of the least hostile institutions to the Jewish people in Britain. Inevitably, and in order to try and show the Jewish population in Britain as a whole that Labour is and remains hostile to anti-semitism, the left leadership of the party have not opened theoretical debates about Zionism but have (correctly) admonished those who have wildly responded to attacks from some Labour MPs who called Labour institutionally anti-semitic. But not because they accepted the term applied to Labour.
The working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance on 26 May 2016 says this: 'Anti-semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.'
Examples of anti-semitism offered by the IHRA include: 'Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.'
For the purpose of fighting against Labour's left leadership's criticism of Israel's policies some Labour MPs have coalesced direct support for Jewish self determination with Zionism. Macron has underlined this idea in his speech on February 21st. But this is another step backwards and does not defend the Jewish people from anti-semitism.
The creation of Israel was a defensive act of self-determination led by Jewish Zionists - and by many non Zionist Jews. It was a product of a successful struggle against British Imperialism and the defeat of the goals of European fascism. It was also turned into an act of war against the indigenous people, mainly the 700,000 Palestinians, whose families now live in militarily-controlled, despotic, slum-settlements.
The US 'nation' was created, in part, by the destruction and military control of American Indians and their dominated settlements. In more modern times Turkey was created in part by the genocide of Armenians and the permanent war against the Kurds, and the South African Boors denied nationality to black South Africans in their own country. Yet it is absurd and futile to try and re-run History.
Despite the crimes against the Palestinians, the Kurds, the American Indians, the South Africans and many others, the nations created by their imperialist histories and now by their new victors cannot and will not be dissolved in any act of super-morality or simply as a result of local wars. But despite the new military and economic realities of such nations, they can still be transformed - as the South African experience partly shows. The accommodation of all the races and peoples who were either once established or are now newly established on what has now become a 'new' nation, is the only political and social answer. The example of the 'two-nation' 'solution' in Israel/Palestine is an utterly catastrophic example of the alternative.
Of course all of the nations mentioned, and including some of the the most modern nations emerging today, have tried to establish myths designed to prevent any progressive measures in the direction of a shared-state that might help resolve, in part or in whole, the accommodation of local races and peoples into the new nations on a completely equal basis. In South Africa the black population has begun to overturn what was the previously lawful white supremacy. But another example of a retrograde step is the recent law in Israel, defined enthusiastically by its supporters as a pro-Zionist law. The Bill, pushed through by the right-wing and religious coalition in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, defines Israel as a nation-state only of the Jewish people. The measure sets 'the development of Jewish settlements nationwide as a national priority' and downgrades the status of Arabic from an official language to one with 'special status'. It is even a step behind the 1794 French Constitution in that it no longer even supports the formal equality of all who live in the boundaries of Israel.
These are some of the errors created when Zionism is conflated with, or even defined as the only way to express the right of the Jewish people to self-determination. Even those whose radicalism stops at the door of the 18th century French Constitution must realise the contradiction here. And while the existence of a State of Israel as such does not, in and of itself, prevent a multi-racial, religious and political population and citizenry, a single state that combined Arabs and Jews as its equal citizenry, its current law confirms exactly the opposite. It, and the whole idea that the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arabs should not seek a common state must be challenged, headed up by the Jewish and Arab people themselves.
Returning to a the need for a successful fight against the new anti-semitism in Britain and Europe, the widest possible defence, including every right of the Jewish people to defend themselves, is vital. But that also implies the widest possible alliance, which cannot be cut back by refusing the support of non-Zionists, or those who criticise the direction of the state of Israel. Otherwise we will confuse, limit and and distort the resistance to fascism and racism.
Most European and US political leadership are faltering with, or actually helping create, a succession of crises across the West. Included in those failures are the stimulation of racism and of virulent anti-semitism. Meanwhile those agents, like the left of the Labour Party and its supporters, who would be on the first line of any fight against racism and anti-semitism, find themselves attacked for the opposite. More and more, the most elementary and accepted expectations established in the second half of the 20th century in the West, regarding social welfare, education, health, economic and personal security, are breaking up. Replacing these traditional 'certainties' are wild schemes promoted by over-ambitious or covertous political leaders who turn the piddling epithets of the blindest media into the wisdom of ages. The answer to this imploding world of the super rich is to rise to the defence of those who need a new society and are able to build it.
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