Tag: palestine

A history of the fight against antisemitism—and the politics it leaves out

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The struggle against antisemitism is a question of burning political importance. Across Europe, parties descended from or modelled on fascism are in government or on the threshold. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland polls as a major party. In Britain, far-right street mobilisations draw crowds unseen since the 1930s, while Reform UK sets the agenda in official politics.

At the same time, the charge of antisemitism has been turned into an instrument of state repression. It is wielded not against the heirs of Hitler and Mosley but against workers, students and Jewish opponents of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Any serious history of the fight against antisemitism must therefore answer definite questions. Who fought it? With what methods? On what class basis? And with what results?

This collection of essays, published by the Wiener Holocaust Library, poses the right question in its title. Its answers, however, are shaped by its producers’ institutional and political commitments.[1]

The book and its sponsors

The volume grew out of the Library’s exhibition Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, shown in London from March to September 2022 and later taken to Parliament. Barbara Warnock, the Library’s senior curator, and Toby Simpson, its director, edited it, and it launched in November 2022.

Its essays trace the individuals and organisations that have countered antisemitism since the Dreyfus Affair. They cover the campaign to free Dreyfus, Alfred Wiener’s anti-Nazi work in Germany and the Netherlands, the 43 Group’s post-war anti-fascist direct action, and the Library’s own monitoring work. A final section examines what the publisher calls the differing forms of antisemitism in Britain in recent decades.

The Wiener Library deserves credit. Founded by Wiener in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to London in 1939, its archive is an irreplaceable record of the Nazi regime and its crimes. The exhibition catalogue drew on photographs from the Community Security Trust (CST) archives and credited the CST’s head of policy, Dave Rich, among others.

That partnership, and the choice of foreword writer, signal where the book will land. Julia Neuberger, senior rabbi of West London Synagogue and a crossbench peer, was among the most prominent establishment voices in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. That is the political lens through which a century of history is ultimately read.

Dreyfus: the decisive role of the socialist movement

The book rightly opens with the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a Jewish artillery officer was framed for espionage by the French General Staff and shipped to Devil’s Island. The affair became the axis around which the Third Republic’s political forces polarised: the army, the Catholic Church, and Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic leagues on one side; republicans, intellectuals, and, decisively, the socialist workers’ movement on the other.

Appeals to the authorities’ good faith did not free Dreyfus. Zola’s J’accuse in January 1898 was an act of political war on the military caste. The turning point came when Jean Jaurès overcame the Guesdist wing of French socialism, which had dismissed the case as a quarrel between bourgeois factions, and brought the organised working class into the fight against clerical-militarist reaction.

This is the period’s first lesson, and it is the one a history organised around “methods” of countering antisemitism tends to blur. Antisemitism in France was the banner of a social coalition seeking to overturn the republic and crush the workers’ movement. The working class pushed it back by intervening as an independent force.

Weimar: the limits of rebuttal

Alfred Wiener, the Library’s founder, stands at the centre of the story. A decorated veteran of the First World War, Wiener worked for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein). He monitored the Nazi press, exposed its forgeries and published counter-propaganda. Around 1930, the Büro Wilhelmstrasse issued Anti-Anti, a handbook of facts for those responding to antisemitic lies.

The courage and diligence of this work are unquestioned. But its strategy rested on the assumption that Nazism could be defeated by information, by the law and by the institutions of the Weimar Republic. Every one of those props gave way. The Nazis were not a misunderstanding to be corrected with better facts. Amid economic collapse, German finance capital and the Junker landowners chose them as the instrument to smash Europe’s most powerful workers’ movement.

United action by Social Democratic and Communist workers offered the only realistic means of stopping Hitler’s advance. But both sides sabotaged such unity: the SPD leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and its institutions, and the Stalinist line denounced Social Democracy as “social fascism” and rejected a genuine united front. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned of the catastrophic consequences of this political paralysis and fought to mobilise the working class in a united front against fascism. Hitler did not conquer power through an irresistible popular mandate in January 1933. Hindenburg installed him as chancellor, backed by powerful sections of Germany’s ruling elite.

A history of anti-antisemitism that does not place this betrayal at the centre cannot explain why the Centralverein’s devoted labours ended in catastrophe. The Library’s archive of rebuttal pamphlets is, in the end, a monument to the limits of enlightenment in the face of a social crisis.

Britain: Cable Street and the 43 Group

The British chapters tell a story whose lessons point in the same direction. On 4 October 1936, tens of thousands of East End workers—Jewish garment workers, Irish dockers, Communist and Independent Labour Party members—blocked Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at Cable Street. The police, who had been sent to clear a path for the fascists, were driven back.

Anglo-Jewry’s official leadership played no part in this victory. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to stay away and leave matters to the authorities. The Communist Party leadership had first planned to send its members to a solidarity rally elsewhere in Spain, and changed course only under pressure from the ranks.

The same pattern recurred after 1945. When Mosley sought to revive his movement, Jewish veterans formed the 43 Group. They broke up fascist meetings, infiltrated fascist organisations and fought them in the streets, again over the objections of the community establishment, which preferred quiet lobbying of the state.

The volume’s attention to the 43 Group is welcome. Their lesson, however, is not about the merits of “direct action” as a technique. It is that fascism was confronted successfully only when working people mobilised independently of—and often against—the police, the courts, and the official leaderships who counselled reliance on them.

Recent decades: Neuberger and the campaign against Corbyn

When the book reaches contemporary Britain, the gap between its historical material and its politics becomes a chasm. The “differing forms of antisemitism” of recent decades are, above all, the terrain of the campaign waged between 2015 and 2020 against Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Neuberger was a leading figure in that campaign. In 2016 she told Newsnight that Labour had a “very particular problem” with antisemitism on the hard left. In June 2018 she urged Jews to resign from the party and said she hoped the issue would stop Labour from being elected. Her 2019 book stopped short of calling Corbyn an antisemite but said he had “behaved like an antisemite”. In the 2019 election, she endorsed the Chief Rabbi’s unprecedented intervention against him.

Her central criterion is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic when its tone would not be used of other countries. This tests subjective impression, not objective content. It mirrors the logic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition”, whose Israel-related examples Labour was forced to adopt in full in 2018 after a campaign in which the three main Jewish newspapers ran an identical front page against Corbyn.

The campaign was political. The Labour right, the Conservative press and the Israeli state set out to destroy a leader who, whatever his limitations, had attracted hundreds of thousands of young people with left-wing rhetoric. Corbyn’s own response was capitulation: he accepted the IHRA definition, suspended allies and offered apology after apology. The 2022 Forde Report, commissioned by Labour itself, found that the antisemitism issue had been used as a factional weapon. None of this alters the existence of real antisemitism, which socialists oppose without compromise. But a history that presents this episode as a chapter in the fight against racism adopts the state’s vantage point.

After 2022: Gaza and the weaponisation of antisemitism

The book closes in 2022. Events since October 2023 have exposed the consequences of the political framework it endorses. Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice found in January 2024 raised plausible claims under the Genocide Convention, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced the territory to rubble.

Throughout, governments in Britain and Europe have used the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism to criminalise opposition. Mass demonstrations in London, in which Jewish contingents marched prominently, were branded “hate marches” by a Conservative home secretary. The Starmer government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, and hundreds of people, many of them pensioners, were arrested for holding placards. In Germany, appeals to Israel’s security as a reason of state have been used to ban protests and cancel Jewish and Palestinian speakers.

The effect is doubly reactionary. It shields a state committing mass atrocities by identifying all Jews with its crimes, the very conflation that real antisemites exploit. And it diverts attention from the genuine and growing danger posed by the far right, which combines hostility to Muslims and migrants with the old conspiracy theories about Jews and finds a friendly hearing in official politics.

Conclusion: the lessons the book does not draw

Read against the grain, the material this volume assembles supports conclusions very different from those of its sponsors. Modern antisemitism has never been simply an irrational prejudice to be corrected by education and monitoring. It has been a tool of reaction, mobilised during periods of capitalist crisis to divert social anger from the ruling class onto a scapegoat and to split the working class.

The working class, Jewish and non-Jewish, has beaten it back only when it intervened independently: in the Dreyfusard movement, on the barricades of Cable Street, and in the streets against Mosley after the war. Where reliance fell on the state, the courts, and bourgeois liberalism, as in Weimar Germany, the outcome was catastrophe. Trotsky, writing in 1938, warned that the further advance of world reaction would bring the physical extermination of the Jews. He insisted that only the socialist transformation of society could secure their future.

The Zionist project offered a different answer: a nation-state built on the dispossession of another people. That answer has produced a state now carrying out atrocities in the name of Jews everywhere, which in turn feeds the antisemitism it claims to combat.

The Wiener Library archives will remain an indispensable resource. But the fight against antisemitism today requires a political perspective this book does not provide. That perspective is the international unity of the working class against capitalism, war and every form of racism, including the racism directed against Palestinians.

Sources

Bibliography

Book under review

  • Warnock, Barbara, and Toby Simpson, eds. Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022. Foreword by Julia Neuberger. London: The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.

Books and documents

  • Equality and Human Rights Commission. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. London: EHRC, October 2020.
  • Forde, Martin. The Forde Report. London: The Labour Party, July 2022.
  • International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024.
  • International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Working Definition of Antisemitism.” Adopted 26 May 2016.
  • Neuberger, Julia. Antisemitism: What It Is. What It Isn’t. Why It Matters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.
  • Sonabend, Daniel. We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain. London: Verso, 2019.
  • Trotsky, Leon. “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism.” December 1938.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
  • The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2022.
  • Zola, Émile. “J’accuse…!” L’Aurore, 13 January 1898.

Press and online sources

  • “Jewish Peer Attacks Labour for Having a ‘Very Particular Problem’ with Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 2016. Link
  • “Senior Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger Urges Jews to Leave Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.” Jewish Chronicle, 22 June 2018. Link
  • “Rabbi Julia Neuberger Rails Against Labour Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 30 May 2019. Link
  • “Senior Rabbi Julia Neuberger Talks Antisemitism in the UK.” Amanpour and Company, PBS, 27 November 2019. Link
  • The Wiener Holocaust Library. “Book Launch: Anti-Antisemitism.” Event listing, 15 November 2022. Link
  • The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Online exhibition. Link

[1] Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022, edited by Barbara Warnock and Toby Simpson, with a foreword by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.

Schama, Zionism and the Politics of Historical Memory

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Simon Schama’s defence of Israel and the campaign to criminalise opposition to genocide

Simon Schama’s recent intervention in defence of Israel is presented as a contribution to historical understanding. In reality, it belongs to a broader political campaign whose purpose is to delegitimise mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The significance of such arguments lies not in their historical accuracy, but in their political function. At a moment when millions of people around the world are expressing opposition to war, ethnic cleansing and imperialist violence, intellectuals associated with the political establishment are increasingly being mobilised to provide moral and historical justification for repression.[1]

The campaign’s central mechanism is straightforward. Criticism of the Israeli state is equated with hostility to Jewish people. Opposition to Zionism is portrayed as a modern form of antisemitism. Protest against the destruction of Gaza becomes evidence of sympathy for forces allegedly seeking the destruction of Jews. Through this process, the unique moral authority associated with the Holocaust is transferred to the contemporary Israeli state, allowing criticism of its actions to be denounced as a revival of humanity’s greatest historical crime.

This conflation is not an intellectual mistake or conceptual confusion. It is a deliberate political operation. Its target is not the racist right, which continues to flourish across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Rather, it is directed against anti-war demonstrators, socialist organisations, students, academics and workers who oppose genocide and imperialist war.

The narrative’s omission of the far right is especially revealing. Many of Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters are found among political forces with long histories of xenophobia, racism and authoritarian nationalism. Across Europe and North America, right-wing nationalist movements have increasingly presented Israel as a model of ethnic exclusivity, militarised borders and state violence against a subject population. These forces are rarely accused of antisemitism when they support Israel because they are politically useful allies. The contradiction exposes the dishonesty of claims that support for Israel constitutes the defining measure of opposition to antisemitism.

At the centre of Schama’s argument lies a familiar liberal-Zionist distinction between Israel’s allegedly noble foundations and the unfortunate excesses of its current government. Schama portrays Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich as departures from a fundamentally democratic and humane project. The implication is that Israel has somehow lost its way.

This narrative cannot withstand historical examination. The catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza did not emerge from a temporary deviation from Israel’s founding principles. It grew out of the state’s historical foundations. The Nakba of 1948, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, was not an accidental by-product of state formation. It was the decisive event that established the state. The subordination and displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population were not peripheral episodes but central components of the Zionist project as it developed in practice.

For decades, Israel has functioned as a strategic ally of the major imperialist powers in the Middle East. Its military, economic and diplomatic position has been inseparable from its role within broader geopolitical calculations pursued by Britain and, increasingly after the Second World War, the United States. To describe the destruction of Gaza merely as the consequence of an extremist government is therefore to obscure the deeper historical and political forces that have shaped the state from the beginning.

Mario Kessler on Antisemitism

The German historian Mario Kessler has made an important contribution to understanding antisemitism by examining it through the history of the socialist movement. His work is particularly valuable because it challenges the widespread assumption that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are fundamentally the same thing. Instead, Kessler demonstrates that some of the strongest and most principled opponents of antisemitism were found within the revolutionary socialist tradition, many of whom were also critics of Zionism.

Kessler approaches antisemitism not simply as a prejudice but as a social and political phenomenon rooted in specific historical conditions. Drawing on Marxist scholarship, he shows how antisemitism often emerged during periods of economic and political crisis, when ruling elites and reactionary movements sought to channel social discontent away from the existing social order and towards a minority group. Jews were portrayed as responsible for social problems that were, in reality, products of capitalism itself.

One of Kessler’s key themes is the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Zionism. He traces debates within the labour movement from the late nineteenth century onward, showing that many Jewish socialists rejected the Zionist project while remaining uncompromising opponents of antisemitism. For figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many members of the Jewish labour movement, the solution to Jewish oppression lay not in creating a separate nation-state but in the international struggle for socialism and democratic equality.

Kessler’s work also highlights the twentieth century’s tragedy. The rise of fascism and the Holocaust devastated the European Jewish population and transformed political attitudes towards Zionism. Yet he argues that understanding this catastrophe requires serious historical analysis rather than political myth-making. The history of antisemitism, in his view, cannot be reduced to support for or opposition to Israel.

Kessler is particularly relevant today because he insists on historical precision. He rejects attempts to use accusations of antisemitism as a weapon against all critics of Israeli policy, while equally opposing genuine antisemitism in all its forms. His work reminds us that the socialist movement developed both a powerful critique of antisemitism and a tradition of internationalism that sought solidarity between peoples rather than separation through competing nationalisms. For readers interested in the relationship between antisemitism, socialism and Zionism, Kessler provides an important historical bridge between nineteenth-century Marxism and contemporary political debates.

The effort to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism also requires the systematic suppression of an alternative political tradition, namely that of revolutionary socialist internationalism. The historical record is clear. The socialist movement, not Zionism, produced the most consistent and principled struggle against antisemitism. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialist organisations opposed antisemitism not as an isolated prejudice but as a reactionary ideology rooted in the contradictions of class society.

David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine

David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is less a conventional history book than a collection of political and historical essays that examine the origins of Zionism, the Palestinian question, and imperialism’s role in the Middle East. Written from a Trotskyist and international socialist standpoint, the book challenges both the mainstream defence of Zionism and the various nationalist perspectives that dominate discussion of the conflict.

One of the book’s strengths is its placement of Zionism in a broader historical context. North argues that Zionism emerged as a response to the oppression of European Jews, but that it developed as a nationalist movement whose fate became closely bound up with the interests of the major imperialist powers. Rather than treating Israel as simply the fulfilment of Jewish self-determination, he examines how the state was formed, its relationship to the displacement of the Palestinian population and its strategic role in the Middle East.

A recurring theme is the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. North insists that opposition to Zionism is not the same thing as antisemitism and points to the long history of socialist opposition to both antisemitism and Jewish nationalism. The book draws heavily on the writings of Marx, Engels, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and, above all, Leon Trotsky. These figures argued that antisemitism was rooted in the crises and contradictions of capitalist society and could not be overcome through the creation of a separate national state.

Particularly interesting are the sections dealing with Trotsky’s analysis of the Jewish question in the 1930s. Trotsky recognised the terrible danger facing European Jewry under fascism while maintaining that Zionism offered no lasting solution. North argues that subsequent events, including the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, have confirmed many of Trotsky’s warnings.

The book also connects the Palestinian struggle to broader questions of war, imperialism, and class politics. Rather than advocating either Israeli or Palestinian nationalism, North advances socialist internationalism, arguing that a genuine democratic solution requires workers’ political unity throughout the region.

Whether one agrees with its conclusions or not, The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is an important statement of the Trotskyist position on one of the most contested questions of modern history. It combines historical analysis, political polemic and theoretical argument in a way that encourages readers to think beyond the narrow framework through which the conflict is usually presented.

August Bebel and the Socialist Struggle Against Antisemitism

August Bebel (1840-1913), the co-founder and leading figure of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), played a decisive role in establishing the Marxist movement as the most consistent opponent of antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Europe. At a time when antisemitic agitation was gaining influence among sections of the middle classes and even among workers affected by economic crisis, Bebel insisted that hostility to Jews was not a form of social protest but a reactionary diversion from the struggle against capitalism.

Bebel is best known for describing antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.” By this he meant that antisemitic demagogues sought to exploit genuine popular grievances while directing anger away from the capitalist system and towards a vulnerable minority. Rather than identifying exploitation as a consequence of the social relations of capitalism, antisemites attributed poverty, unemployment and financial crises to the alleged conspiracies of Jewish individuals. In doing so, they transformed social discontent into racial hatred and protected the existing economic order.

For Bebel and the Marxist movement, antisemitism was not simply a prejudice or moral failing. It was a political weapon used by ruling elites and reactionary forces to divide the working class. Antisemitic campaigns encouraged workers to blame Jewish neighbours instead of the capitalist class as a whole. This undermined workers’ unity across national, religious, and ethnic lines, which Marxists regarded as essential to socialist struggle.

Bebel’s opposition to antisemitism anticipated later Marxist analyses developed by figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. His insistence that workers reject all forms of racial and religious chauvinism became a foundational principle of socialist internationalism. At a time when many liberal politicians accommodated antisemitic sentiment, Bebel and the SPD publicly opposed it, making the socialist movement the principal political force combating antisemitism in Germany.

His intervention remains historically significant because it demonstrated that the fight against antisemitism is inseparable from the struggle for working-class unity and social equality. For Bebel, the liberation of Jewish people could not be achieved through exclusion, nationalism, or scapegoating, but only through workers’ common struggle against capitalism itself.

No figure understood this process more profoundly than Leon Trotsky. Writing as fascism rose, Trotsky warned that capitalism’s crisis threatened catastrophe for European Jewry. The destruction of democratic institutions, the growth of fascist movements and the degeneration of bourgeois society pointed toward unprecedented crimes. At the same time, Trotsky rejected Zionism’s claim to provide a solution to the Jewish question through the creation of a national state in Palestine. He argued that the historical problem confronting Jewish people could not be resolved through a nationalist project, but only through the international struggle against capitalism itself.

Subsequent history tragically confirmed both aspects of Trotsky’s analysis. The Holocaust exposed the barbarism to which capitalism in crisis could descend. Yet the establishment of Israel did not eliminate antisemitism. Nor did it resolve the underlying contradictions that had produced it. Instead, new forms of oppression and conflict emerged, above all through the dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people.

This history poses an insurmountable challenge to Schama’s argument. The political tendency that most consistently analysed antisemitism, fought it and predicted the catastrophe confronting European Jewry was also the tendency that opposed Zionism. The existence of that tradition refutes the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.

Indeed, the current attempt to identify opposition to Zionism with hatred of Jews requires the erasure of a century of socialist political experience. Most crucially, the conflation of Judaism with the Israeli state does not protect Jewish people. It places them in greater danger. Antisemitism has historically functioned by attributing the crimes, failures and contradictions of society to Jews as a collective. Zionist ideology, particularly in its contemporary forms, insists that Israel acts in the name of Jews everywhere and that Jewish identity is inextricably bound to the state. This claim reproduces, from a different starting point, precisely the framework upon which antisemitism has traditionally depended.

When the actions of the Israeli state are identified with Jews as a whole, the distinction between a government and a people is consciously blurred. The responsibility for state crimes is transferred to an entire global community. This does not undermine antisemitism. It creates conditions in which antisemitic narratives can flourish.

The defence of Jewish people against antisemitism therefore cannot be entrusted to the Israeli state, nor to the imperialist governments that provide it with diplomatic cover, financial support and military assistance. Genuine opposition to antisemitism requires a fundamentally different political perspective.

That perspective begins with rejecting all forms of nationalism and ethnic exclusivity. It insists on the unity of Jewish, Arab, and international workers based on common class interests. It recognises that war, racism, authoritarianism and genocide arise not from ancient hatreds but from the crisis of the capitalist system itself.

The growing effort to criminalise anti-Zionist sentiment and suppress opposition to genocide is part of a broader assault on democratic rights. Governments that support Israel’s actions in Gaza increasingly resort to censorship, police repression and legal intimidation because they confront widening popular opposition. The attack on Palestine solidarity movements is one aspect of a wider turn toward authoritarian forms of rule in conditions of mounting social inequality, geopolitical conflict and economic instability.

Viewed in this context, Schama’s essay is not primarily a contribution to historical debate. It is a political intervention on behalf of the existing order. Its purpose is to provide intellectual legitimacy for the suppression of opposition to imperialist violence and to shield the Israeli state from scrutiny by presenting criticism as prejudice.

Defending historical truth requires rejecting this falsification. Antisemitism is a real and deadly form of reaction whose history culminated in some of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. But it cannot be fought through support for a state carrying out mass violence against an oppressed people. Nor can opposition to genocide be silenced by accusations designed to delegitimise political dissent.

The struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Zionism are not mutually exclusive. Historically, some of the most principled opponents of antisemitism understood this. Their perspective remains indispensable today. The defence of democratic rights, the opposition to genocide and the fight against antisemitism all require the same political foundation: the independent mobilisation of the international working class against capitalism, imperialism and war.

Bibliography

Bebel, August. Mass and Class: Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980.

Kessler, Mario. Antisemitism, Zionism and Socialism: Studies in the History of Jewish Labour and Political Movements. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, various editions.

Lenin, V. I. “Anti-Jewish Pogroms.” In Collected Works, Vol. 29. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

North, David. The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine: Historical and Political Essays. Detroit: Mehring Books, 2011.

North, David. “Socialist Internationalism and the Struggle Against Zionism and Imperialism.” International Youth and Students for Social Equality Lecture, 2023.

Trotsky, Leon. “Thermidor and Antisemitism” (1937).

Trotsky, Leon. “On the Jewish Question” (1934-1940), in Writings of Leon Trotsky.

Weiss, Clara. “Mario Kessler on Marxism, Antisemitism and Zionism.” World Socialist Web Site, 3 July 2025.

Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

[1] Jew-Hatred: Jewish Quarterly 265 by Simon Schama, 13 Oct. 2026, 96 pages

The Withdrawal of Sally Rooney’s Novels and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Rule in Britain

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A Threshold Has Been Crossed

The withdrawal of Sally Rooney’s novels from circulation in the United Kingdom marks a decisive and unprecedented moment in the country’s political life. For the first time in modern British history, anti-terror legislation has made a major contemporary novelist’s entire body of work effectively inaccessible to readers. This is neither a symbolic gesture nor a dispute between a publisher and an author. It is a concrete expression of a new political reality: Britain is becoming a state where political dissent, artistic expression, and even the circulation of fiction are subordinated to the demands of national security and imperialist war.

Two lines capture the essence of this shift with stark clarity:

“Faber has announced that it will no longer distribute Sally Rooney’s books in the UK, as a result of legislation that prevents it from giving the author earnings from UK sales of her work.”

“A novelist’s royalties, a publisher’s contracts and the circulation of works of fiction are now subject to the terror laws.”

These sentences are not rhetorical flourishes; they describe a legal reality created by the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000. Rooney’s stated intention to donate royalties to the group—a non-violent direct-action organisation that targets arms manufacturers supplying Israel’s war in Gaza—now puts her publisher at risk of prosecution. The result is censorship unprecedented in scope and significance, exposing the authoritarian logic behind British state policy.

The July 2025 proscription of Palestine Action was itself a watershed. For the first time, a direct-action movement targeting property rather than people was designated a terrorist organisation. The government cited damage to two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, an action that caused no casualties. Yet the group was placed in the same legal category as organisations responsible for mass-casualty bombings. This redefinition of “terrorism” was no technical adjustment; it was a political manoeuvre—a deliberate expansion of the state’s coercive powers to include forms of protest that threaten the interests of the military-industrial complex.

The consequences were immediate and sweeping. Belonging to or expressing support for Palestine Action became a criminal offence carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years. Pensioners, clergy, students, and workers were dragged off by police for holding cardboard signs. On July 30, police arrested 117 people outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where more than 2,000 cases related to supporting the group were due to be heard. Even sections of the judiciary baulked. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful, finding that Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold to justify a ban. But the government did not retreat. In June, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, with five judges declaring the ban “justified and proportionate” and asserting that assessments of “future risk” were “pre‑eminently” matters for the executive. In four months, the judiciary moved from scepticism to full deference, signalling the consolidation of a legal doctrine designed to insulate the security state from democratic scrutiny.

The Rooney affair must be understood in this context. Her novels have not been withdrawn because of their content or an editorial dispute. They have been withdrawn because the state has criminalised the author’s political convictions. Rooney’s intention to donate royalties to Palestine Action—a movement opposing British complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza—as an act of solidarity now makes fulfilling her publishing contracts potentially illegal. Faber’s decision to halt distribution is therefore not an act of commercial prudence but of political compliance. The publisher’s statement that selling an author’s work while being unable to pay her is “an unconscionable situation” obscures a deeper truth: the state has claimed the right to regulate cultural production through anti-terror legislation, and the cultural establishment has accepted that claim without resistance.

This acceptance is itself politically revealing. Where are the joint statements from the major publishing houses, the Society of Authors, PEN, and the literary prize committees calling for the ban to be repealed? Their silence is no oversight; it reflects their integration into the state’s ideological apparatus. The cultural establishment will not defend democratic rights because it is structurally incapable of doing so. Its function is to reproduce the ideological conditions of capitalist rule, not challenge them.

The withdrawal of Rooney’s novels thus points to a broader transformation. Britain is entering a period in which the ruling class, faced with capitalism’s deepening crisis and preparing for wider war, is dismantling democratic rights won through generations of struggle. The criminalisation of Palestine Action, mass arrests of peaceful protesters, judicial deference to executive power, and now the censorship of a major novelist all reflect the same process: a shift toward authoritarian rule. This introduction sets the stage for examining that process in its historical, political, and class dimensions. The Rooney case is no anomaly. It is a warning of what is being prepared—and of what must be opposed.

The Legal Mechanism: Terrorism Law as Cultural Regulation

The Labour government justified the proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 based on a single incident: an act of direct action in which activists damaged two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. The action caused no casualties, involved no threat to life, and was explicitly aimed at disrupting Britain’s logistical support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Yet this incident was seized upon to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation — the first time in British history that a direct‑action movement targeting property rather than people has been placed in the same legal category as organisations responsible for mass‑casualty violence. This unprecedented step marked a qualitative escalation in the British state’s assault on democratic rights.

The significance of this reclassification cannot be overstated. It deliberately expands the definition of “terrorism” to include forms of political protest that challenge the interests of the military‑industrial complex. In effect, the state has asserted that damage to military property — even when carried out as part of a non‑violent anti‑war protest — is equivalent to acts of indiscriminate violence against civilians. This is not a neutral legal interpretation but a political manoeuvre designed to criminalise dissent and insulate the machinery of war from public opposition.

The consequences have been sweeping and immediate. Support for Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years in prison. More than 2,000 cases are pending, many involving individuals arrested for holding cardboard signs or expressing solidarity on social media. On July 30, police arrested 117 people outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where hearings related to the proscription were taking place. Pensioners, clergy, students, and workers have been dragged off by police for acts that, until recently, would have been protected under the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. The scale of repression is unprecedented in modern Britain, and it reveals the extent to which the state is prepared to deploy anti‑terror legislation against its own population.

The impact on Sally Rooney underscores the breadth of this authoritarian turn. Rooney herself has been advised she could face arrest upon entering the UK, forcing her to accept awards by proxy. Her declared intention to donate royalties to Palestine Action — an act of political solidarity — now renders the fulfilment of her publishing contracts potentially illegal. The withdrawal of her novels from circulation is therefore not an isolated cultural event but a direct consequence of the proscription’s sweeping scope. It shows that the terror laws are not confined to policing protest but extend into artistic expression, cultural production, and the circulation of literature.

The judiciary’s role in legitimising this transformation is central. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful, finding that the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold required to justify a ban. This ruling briefly suggested that judicial oversight might check executive overreach. But the government did not retreat. In June, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, with five judges declaring the ban “justified and proportionate.” Their ruling went far beyond a simple reversal. It established a doctrine of extreme judicial deference to the executive, asserting that assessments of “future risk” were “pre‑eminently” matters for the Home Secretary.

This doctrine represents a profound shift in the constitutional balance of power. It effectively grants the executive the authority to criminalise political movements based on speculative assessments of potential future actions. The judiciary, rather than scrutinising the government’s claims, has accepted them as matters of specialist expertise beyond judicial competence. In doing so, it has constructed a legal architecture suited to authoritarian governance — one in which the executive’s assertions about national security are treated as unchallengeable.

The implications of this shift are far‑reaching. The Court of Appeal’s ruling does not merely uphold the proscription of Palestine Action; it lays the groundwork for future bans on political organisations, protest movements, and cultural institutions deemed threatening to the state’s strategic interests. It signals that the judiciary will not act as a barrier to expanding executive power but will instead facilitate it. This is the legal foundation for the withdrawal of Rooney’s novels. The state has asserted the right to regulate cultural production through anti‑terror legislation, and the courts have affirmed that right.

The proscription of Palestine Action must therefore be understood as part of a broader transformation of the British state. It is not an isolated response to a specific protest action but a strategic move within a wider project: the restructuring of the legal and political order to suppress dissent, protect the interests of the military‑industrial complex, and prepare for the social conflicts that will accompany Britain’s deepening involvement in imperialist war. The criminalisation of Palestine Action, the mass arrests of peaceful protesters, and the censorship of a major novelist are all expressions of this project.

The construction of an authoritarian legal order is now well advanced. The question is not whether the state will continue to expand its powers but how far it will go — and how the working class will respond.

The Rooney Case: Cultural Production Under State Supervision

Rooney’s decision to donate royalties to Palestine Action was an act of political solidarity. Under the new legal regime, it became a criminal liability. Faber’s withdrawal of her books is therefore not a commercial decision but a political one — an act of compliance with the state’s demand that cultural production be subordinated to counter‑insurgency logic.

The publisher’s statement that selling an author’s work while being unable to pay her is “an unconscionable situation” is revealing. It frames the withdrawal as a matter of contractual ethics rather than political coercion. But the choice to comply rather than resist is itself political. The cultural establishment — publishers, prize committees, PEN, the Society of Authors — has responded with near‑total silence. This is not an oversight. These institutions are structurally integrated into the state’s ideological apparatus and cannot be relied on to defend democratic rights.

Rooney’s refusal to recant is admirable, but the article correctly notes that personal moral courage cannot halt the authoritarian turn. The issue is systemic, not individual.

Labour’s Role: The Party of State Security

The Labour government justified the proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 based on a single incident: an act of direct action in which activists damaged two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. The action caused no casualties, involved no threat to life, and was explicitly aimed at disrupting Britain’s logistical support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Yet this incident was seized upon to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation — the first time in British history that a direct‑action movement targeting property rather than people has been placed in the same legal category as organisations responsible for mass‑casualty violence. This unprecedented step marked a qualitative escalation in the British state’s assault on democratic rights.

The significance of this reclassification cannot be overstated. It deliberately expands the definition of “terrorism” to include forms of political protest that challenge the interests of the military‑industrial complex. In effect, the state has asserted that damage to military property — even when carried out as part of a non‑violent anti‑war protest — is equivalent to acts of indiscriminate violence against civilians. This is not a neutral legal interpretation but a political manoeuvre designed to criminalise dissent and insulate the machinery of war from public opposition.

The consequences were immediate and sweeping. Support for Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years in prison. More than 2,000 cases are pending, many involving individuals arrested for holding cardboard signs or expressing solidarity on social media. On July 30, police arrested 117 people outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where hearings related to the proscription were taking place. Pensioners, clergy, students, and workers have been dragged off by police for acts that, until recently, would have been protected under the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. The scale of repression is unprecedented in modern Britain and reveals the extent to which the state is prepared to deploy anti‑terror legislation against its own population.

The impact on Sally Rooney underscores the breadth of this authoritarian turn. Rooney has been advised she could face arrest upon entering the UK, forcing her to accept awards by proxy. Her declared intention to donate royalties to Palestine Action — an act of political solidarity — now renders the fulfilment of her publishing contracts potentially illegal. The withdrawal of her novels from circulation is therefore not an isolated cultural event but a direct consequence of the proscription’s sweeping scope. It shows that the terror laws are not confined to policing protest but extend into artistic expression, cultural production, and the circulation of literature.

The judiciary’s role in legitimising this transformation is central. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful, finding that Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold required to justify a ban. But the government did not retreat. In June, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, declaring the ban “justified and proportionate” and asserting that assessments of “future risk” were “pre‑eminently” matters for the Home Secretary. This doctrine of extreme judicial deference represents a profound shift in the constitutional balance of power. It effectively grants the executive the authority to criminalise political movements based on speculative assessments of potential future actions.

The implications are far‑reaching. The Court of Appeal’s ruling lays the groundwork for future bans on political organisations, protest movements, and cultural institutions deemed threatening to the state’s strategic interests. It signals that the judiciary will not act as a barrier to expanding executive power but will instead facilitate it. The proscription of Palestine Action must therefore be understood as part of a broader transformation of the British state: the construction of a legal order designed to suppress dissent, protect the interests of the military‑industrial complex, and prepare for the social conflicts accompanying Britain’s deepening involvement in imperialist war.

A Warning and a Turning Point

The withdrawal of Sally Rooney’s novels is not a cultural controversy. It is a politically significant event. It demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that the British state is prepared to regulate artistic expression through anti‑terror legislation, criminalise political solidarity, and subordinate cultural production to the logic of imperialist war. This is not the accidental by‑product of an overzealous bureaucracy, nor the misapplication of a statute designed for other purposes. It is the conscious deployment of the terror laws as an instrument of political control, aimed at suppressing dissent and disciplining cultural life in accordance with the strategic needs of the ruling class.

The Rooney case reveals the true scope of the authoritarian turn. Counter-terrorism policy has placed a novelist’s royalties, a publisher’s contracts, and the circulation of fiction under its jurisdiction. The state has asserted that an author’s political convictions — expressed not through violence but through the donation of earnings — constitute grounds for restricting access to her work. This profoundly ruptures the liberal‑democratic norms that Britain’s political establishment claims to uphold. It signals that the boundaries of permissible expression will henceforth be determined not by public debate or artistic autonomy but by the government’s security priorities.

This development must be understood within the broader context of Britain’s deepening involvement in imperialist conflict. The proscription of Palestine Action, the mass arrests of peaceful protesters, and the judicial doctrine of deference to executive power are all components of a single process: the restructuring of the state to prepare for war abroad and repression at home. As Britain supplies arms components for the F‑35 programme, flies surveillance missions over Gaza, and aligns itself ever more tightly with Washington’s geopolitical agenda, it simultaneously expands the domestic machinery required to silence opposition to these policies. The censorship of Rooney’s novels is not an aberration; it is the cultural expression of this militarised political order.

The cultural establishment’s muted response confirms the depth of the crisis. Publishers, prize committees, PEN, and the Society of Authors have issued no collective defence of artistic freedom. Their silence is not simply cowardice but reflects their structural position within the state’s ideological apparatus. These institutions are not designed to resist authoritarianism; they are designed to accommodate it. Their function is to reproduce the cultural legitimacy of the existing order, not to challenge its foundations. When confronted with the terror laws, they comply.

The judiciary has likewise demonstrated its willingness to facilitate the authoritarian turn. The Court of Appeal’s ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is “justified and proportionate,” and that assessments of “future risk” are matters for the executive, represents a decisive shift in the constitutional balance of power. It effectively grants the Home Secretary the authority to criminalise political movements on speculative claims. This doctrine is not a temporary aberration but a durable legal architecture suited to the needs of a state preparing for intensified social conflict.

It warns of what is being prepared. The censorship of Rooney’s novels is a harbinger of future measures aimed at suppressing political opposition, regulating cultural production, and criminalising solidarity with movements that challenge Britain’s imperialist role. The question now is whether the working class will build the political force capable of resisting this offensive — or whether the authoritarian transformation of Britain will proceed unchecked.

The courts, the cultural establishment, and the parliamentary parties cannot be entrusted with the defence of democratic rights. It requires the independent mobilisation of the working class, armed with a socialist programme that opposes war, rejects the authoritarian state, and challenges the capitalist system that produces both. Without such a movement, the repression now directed at Palestine Action and Sally Rooney will expand, deepen, and harden into a permanent feature of British political life.

Bibliography & Relevant Articles

Primary Reporting

  • Publishers Weekly: Coverage of Faber’s withdrawal and legal implications.
  • Times & Star: Reporting on Rooney’s statements regarding criminal liability.
  • New Arab: Analysis of the proscription’s impact on protest movements.
  • Leinster Express: Details on the High Court and Court of Appeal rulings.
  • Huck Magazine: Documentation of mass arrests and police repression.
  • Express & Star: Commentary on cultural institutions’ muted response.
  • AP News: Background on Palestine Action’s designation and political context.

Secondary Analysis

  • World Socialist Web Site (WSWS):
    • “Britain’s High Court says government acted illegally in outlawing protest group Palestine Action.”
    • “Labour’s authoritarian turn and the criminalisation of dissent.”
    • “The political significance of the Rooney case.”

Theoretical & Historical Works

  • E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
  • Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy.
  • Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.
  • Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis.
  •  

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: Liberal moral revulsion and the political dead end of the intelligentsia.

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

A book born of a historic crime

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This emerges from one of the defining atrocities of the twenty-first century: the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. On October 25, 2023, three weeks into the bombardment, El Akkad published a brief social-media post predicting that, once accountability became impossible and dissent cost nothing, “everyone will claim to have always opposed the slaughter.” Viewed more than ten million times, the post captured a truth millions instinctively recognised: having justified and facilitated the mass killing, the political and media establishment would one day try to rewrite its own record. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, the book that grew from that sentence has resonated deeply with those horrified by Gaza’s destruction and repelled by the complicity of governments, universities, cultural institutions, and the press.

That response is itself politically significant. It expresses the profound alienation of broad sections of the population, especially young people, from the political establishment that has funded, armed, and defended the annihilation of an entire population. The disgust is real, deep, and justified. It reflects not only revulsion at images of children pulled from rubble, hospitals bombed, and entire neighbourhoods levelled, but also the recognition that institutions claiming to embody democratic values have revealed themselves as instruments of imperialist violence. Millions have watched the Trump administration, the European Union, and every major imperialist power provide diplomatic cover, military hardware, and political legitimacy to a campaign of extermination. Millions have watched the media parrot lies, suppress evidence, and smear protesters as antisemites. Millions have watched university administrators summon riot police against students demanding an end to genocide.

El Akkad’s book gives voice to this disgust. It catalogues the moral cowardice of editors who refused to use the word “genocide,” cultural figures who stayed silent to protect their careers, and a liberal intelligentsia that retreated into evasions and platitudes. Written in anger, the book’s anger is entirely justified. But disgust, however sincere, is not a political programme. Here, El Akkad’s book reveals the limitations of an entire social layer: the liberal intelligentsia, shaken by the abyss but unable to explain how it arrived there or how humanity can escape it. The book is framed as a “breakup letter with the West,” a lament for betrayed values. But the genocide in Gaza is not a betrayal of Western values; it expresses the real interests of the ruling classes of the United States and Europe. Imperialism did not lose its soul in Gaza. It revealed its essence.

El Akkad’s category of “the West” is therefore politically useless. It treats imperialism as a moral failure rather than a socio‑economic system rooted in the domination of finance capital and the struggle for global hegemony. It conflates rulers and ruled, obscuring the decisive fact that the same governments that bomb Gaza are waging war on the living standards and democratic rights of workers at home. The millions who marched in London, New York and Berlin; the dockworkers who refused to load arms shipments; the students beaten by police- these too are “the West.” The question is not whether the West has lied, but which class rules it, and which class can end that rule.

El Akkad’s book records the moment when a section of the liberal intelligentsia saw the abyss. But seeing the abyss is not the same as understanding it. And understanding it is not the same as developing the political perspective required to overcome it. The task is not to mourn the collapse of liberal illusions, but to arm the working class with a scientific understanding of imperialism and the revolutionary programme needed to end it.

The book’s strengths: A searing portrait of moral cowardice

El Akkad, born in Egypt, raised partly in Qatar and educated in Canada, spent years as a journalist covering Guantánamo, the war in Afghanistan and the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. These experiences form the emotional and political substratum of his book. He writes not as a detached observer but as someone who has repeatedly witnessed the machinery of state violence and the moral evasions that accompany it. His anger toward the media, cultural institutions and the liberal intelligentsia is genuine and sharply expressed. He catalogues the editors who refused to use the word “genocide,” the university administrators who summoned riot police against peaceful encampments, and the literary figures who remained silent to protect their careers. As he puts it, these were the people who “would not use the word ‘genocide,’ the university administrators who sent riot police against encampments, the literary figures who stayed silent to protect their careers.”

His contempt for the bien-pensant press’s “both sides” evasions is entirely justified. The media’s role in laundering the genocide through euphemisms, distortions, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian voices was not an incidental failure but a structural function. The press acted as an ideological arm of the state, manufacturing consent for mass murder while presenting itself as a neutral arbiter. El Akkad’s indictment of this cowardice is one of the book’s strongest elements. As a description of the moral rot of official society, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This has undeniable force. But a description is not an explanation. And moral revulsion is not a strategy.

This is the book’s decisive limitation, and the social layer it represents. El Akkad’s outrage targets individuals and institutions that failed to live up to their professed values. But the failure is not personal; it is systemic. The media did not avoid the word “genocide” because of individual cowardice alone. They avoided it because acknowledging genocide would implicate the entire political and economic order of American imperialism. University administrators did not call riot police because they were personally timid; they did so because universities function as corporate entities integrated into the state apparatus. Literary figures did not remain silent merely out of fear for their reputations; they remained silent because the cultural establishment is structurally dependent on the same class interests that prosecute imperialist war.

El Akkad’s book captures the symptoms but not the disease. It records the moral collapse of liberal institutions but does not explain why that collapse was inevitable. The abyss shakes the liberal intelligentsia, but it cannot comprehend the historical and class forces that produced it. Its response is emotional rather than analytical, moral rather than political. It recoils from barbarism but cannot identify the social force that could end it.

The tragedy of Gaza cannot be understood through the lens of personal betrayal or institutional hypocrisy. It must be understood as the outcome of an imperialist global system driven by the interests of finance capital and enforced through military violence. To oppose genocide requires more than disgust; it requires a scientific understanding of this system and a strategy rooted in the independent mobilisation of the international working class.

The central flaw: “The West” as a moral category

El Akkad’s central analytic category is “the West,” understood as a set of professed values- freedom, human rights, the rule of law- now exposed as hypocrisy. This framework is profoundly inadequate. It treats imperialism as a moral failure rather than a socio‑economic system rooted in definite class interests. It assumes the ruling classes of the United States and Europe have betrayed their own ideals, when in fact those ideals have always served as ideological cover for pursuing global hegemony.

The genocide in Gaza is not a betrayal of the “values” of American and European capitalism. It expresses the ruling classes’ real interests in those countries. For more than a century, imperialist policy in the Middle East has been determined by the drive to control the region’s resources, strategic routes and geopolitical chokepoints. From the Sykes–Picot Agreement to the CIA‑engineered coup against Mossadegh, from the arming of the Shah to the invasion of Iraq, the imperialist powers have treated the region as a battleground for the assertion of their economic and strategic dominance. Israel functions as the spearhead of US imperialism in the region, a heavily militarised outpost whose role is to enforce American interests through overwhelming violence.

The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the slaughter continued and escalated under Trump; it was not a moral lapse. It was policy. It flowed from the strategic calculations of the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies, which view Israel as indispensable to maintaining US control over the Middle East. The bombs dropped on Gaza were not the result of moral confusion or political cowardice; they were the logical outcome of imperialist strategy.

To speak of “the West” as a single moral community obscures the decisive question: class. It collapses rulers and ruled into a single category, erasing the fundamental antagonism between the capitalist class that directs imperialist policy and the working class that suffers its consequences. The same governments that bomb Gaza are waging war on the jobs, wages and democratic rights of workers at home. They slash social programmes, attack trade unions, criminalise protest and funnel billions into the military‑industrial complex. The working class is not the beneficiary of imperialism; it is one of its victims.

The dockworkers who refused to load arms shipments, the students beaten by police, and the millions who marched in London, New York and Berlin are also “the West.” Their actions demonstrate that opposition to genocide is not geographically or culturally determined but socially determined. It arises not from “Western values” but from the objective interests of the working class, which has no stake in imperialist domination and every reason to oppose it.

The question is not whether the West has lied, but which class rules it, and which class can end that rule. The ruling class lies because its interests require it. It speaks of human rights while arming dictatorships, of democracy while supporting coups, of peace while preparing for war. These contradictions are not accidental; they are inherent in a system based on exploitation, competition and the global struggle for markets and resources.

El Akkad’s category of “the West” therefore functions as a political diversion. It directs attention away from the capitalist class and toward an amorphous cultural entity. It encourages despair over analysis, moral lamentation over political struggle. It suggests that the problem is hypocrisy rather than imperialism, values rather than class power.

Liberal disillusionment: Expecting better from those who never offered it

The emotional centre of El Akkad’s book is disappointment with liberalism, particularly the Democratic Party milieu in which much of the American literary world lives. He writes as a man who believed the West offered justice and discovered that much of what it promises is a lie. This sense of betrayal permeates the text. It is the disillusionment of someone who expected moral courage from institutions that have never demonstrated it. The shock is genuine, but it also reveals the political naïveté of a social layer that mistook liberal rhetoric for liberal reality.

Yet the book never draws the necessary political conclusion: the Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military‑intelligence apparatus. It is not a vehicle for reform, and appeals to its conscience are politically bankrupt. The same party that postures as defender of human rights has overseen drone assassinations, mass surveillance, wars of aggression and the arming of Israel to the teeth. Its role in Gaza is not an aberration but the continuation of a decades‑long imperialist trajectory. To imagine that such a party can be pressured into moral action is to misunderstand its class character entirely.

Instead, El Akkad retreats into the language of individual moral choice- refusal, bearing witness, what one person can do as a citizen and father. These impulses are not ignoble. They reflect a sincere desire to resist barbarism. But they are politically impotent. Individual refusal does not stop bombs. Bearing witness does not halt the machinery of imperialist war. The moral courage of isolated individuals, however admirable, cannot substitute for a collective, organised, class‑based struggle against the system that produces genocide.

The book is permeated by helplessness, the direct product of its failure to identify any social force capable of transforming society. El Akkad sees the abyss but cannot locate the agency capable of overcoming it. His narrative is moral collapse without political resolution, outrage without strategy, and despair without direction. This is not a personal failing but the liberal intelligentsia’s characteristic limitation: it recoils from the consequences of imperialism yet remains ideologically tethered to the very institutions that enforce it.

The tragedy of Gaza demands more than sorrow or revulsion. It demands a scientific understanding of imperialism and the recognition that only the international working class mobilised independently of all capitalist parties possesses the power to end the system responsible for such crimes.

The politics of moral witness: A dead end

This impasse mirrors the pseudo-left’s broader crisis. In a March 2024 lecture at the University of Michigan, David North addressed Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and journalist Chris Hedges’s celebration of it, who hailed the act as “a potent political message.” North’s answer applies equally to El Akkad’s politics of moral witness. He insisted that the turn toward individual acts of desperation reflects not political clarity but political exhaustion. As North explained:

“The fundamental driving force of social revolution is not inchoate and desperate rage but an understanding of the objective contradictions of the world capitalist system and the mass social action that is guided by the comprehension of these contradictions.”

This is the essential point. Rage, grief, moral shock- these are powerful emotions, but they do not constitute a strategy. They do not identify the social forces that can halt imperialist barbarism. They do not explain the historical and economic processes that produce genocide. And they do not provide a path for the working class to intervene as an independent political force.

The problem confronting the movement against the genocide, North insisted, “has not been public indifference but the absence of a political perspective and strategy.” Millions have marched, occupied campuses, blocked ports, and defied police repression. The obstacle is not apathy but the political framework that has confined these actions. As North noted, the protests “have remained within the confines of the existing structures of bourgeois politics… directed not toward the independent political mobilisation of the working class against capitalist rule but to the application of pressure on bourgeois governments.”

This is precisely the dead end El Akkad’s book expresses. His narrative is one of moral collapse without political resolution. He documents institutional cowardice but cannot explain why those institutions behaved as they did. He condemns hypocrisy but does not identify the class interests that make hypocrisy inevitable. He recoils from genocide but cannot conceive of a social force capable of stopping it. The result is a politics of witness, not a politics of struggle.

El Akkad’s book is therefore a literary expression of the broader impasse of the pseudo‑left: a movement that responds to imperialist barbarism with moral anguish rather than scientific analysis, with individual gestures rather than collective strategy, with despair rather than revolutionary perspective. It is a politics that sees the abyss but cannot see beyond it.

Identity politics: A reactionary diversion

The promotional framing around El Akkad’s book speaks of a “deep fracture” for Black, brown and Indigenous Americans and for younger generations who had kept faith in Western ideals. This racial and generational framing- the stock-in-trade of identity politics- divides the working class precisely where unity is required. It interprets political disillusionment not as a universal response to imperialist barbarism but as the particular trauma of specific demographic groups. In doing so, it transforms what is fundamentally a class question into a mosaic of racial and generational grievances.

The opposition to the Gaza genocide has cut across every racial, ethnic and national line. Millions of workers and youth of every background have marched in London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Johannesburg, Sydney and São Paulo. Dockworkers of diverse origins refused to load shipments of arms. Students from every demographic category faced police repression. Healthcare workers, teachers, postal workers, artists and engineers joined demonstrations demanding an end to the slaughter. The movement’s strength lies in its universality: it expresses the shared interests of the international working class.

Identity politics serves the ruling class by fragmenting this unity. It encourages people to view political questions through the lens of personal identity rather than social position. It substitutes demographic categories for class analysis, obscuring the fact that imperialist violence is directed not at particular racial groups but at entire populations whose land, resources and strategic position are coveted by the major powers. It reduces the struggle against genocide to a matter of “representation,” “visibility,” or “betrayed ideals,” rather than confronting the capitalist system that produces such crimes.

Moreover, identity politics provides the ruling class with a convenient ideological shield. Governments and corporations promote diversity initiatives, symbolic gestures and rhetorical acknowledgements of historical injustice while continuing to wage war, suppress dissent and attack workers’ living standards. The same institutions that celebrate “inclusion” and “equity” have supported the bombardment of Gaza, armed Israel, censored pro‑Palestinian voices and deployed police against student encampments. Identity politics allows them to present themselves as progressive while pursuing reactionary policies.

By adopting this framework, El Akkad’s book inadvertently reinforces these divisions. It interprets disillusionment as a crisis of particular groups rather than a crisis of the entire social order. In doing so, it obscures the only force capable of ending imperialist barbarism: the unified, international working class.

The embrace of the establishment: Outrage without threat

The book’s reception carries a bitter irony. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction, alongside a stream of honours from the same cultural establishment whose silence El Akkad condemns. Institutions that spent two years averting their eyes now celebrate a book about averting one’s eyes. The very editors, prize committees and cultural gatekeepers who refused to speak plainly while Gaza burned now congratulate themselves for recognising a work that laments their cowardice. In this sense, the book’s success is not a contradiction but a confirmation of El Akkad’s own prediction: the official world is already preparing to have “always been against this.”

This embrace is possible because the book, for all its anger, poses no threat to anyone. It indicts complicity, not capitalism; hypocrisy, not the profit system that requires it. It condemns silence but does not expose the class interests that make silence inevitable. It mourns the collapse of liberal ideals but does not challenge the social order that weaponises those ideals in the service of imperialist violence. A literary establishment can absorb moral outrage. It cannot absorb a programme.

The cultural institutions that now celebrate El Akkad’s book are deeply integrated into the capitalist state’s ideological apparatus. Their function is not to challenge imperialism but to manage dissent, convert political anger into safe moral sentiment, and ensure outrage never develops into revolutionary consciousness. They can reward a book that expresses sorrow, disappointment and disgust. They cannot reward a book that identifies the working class as the revolutionary force capable of ending imperialist war. They can honour a narrative of personal disillusionment. They cannot honour a call for the overthrow of the system responsible for genocide.

The establishment’s embrace of El Akkad’s book therefore reveals more about the establishment than about the book. It demonstrates bourgeois culture’s capacity to metabolise criticism, turn even the documentation of its own failures into a commodity, and present moral anguish as a substitute for political clarity. The book’s success signals not institutional repentance but institutional self‑preservation. It allows the ruling class to acknowledge “mistakes” without confronting the system that produced them.

In the end, the book’s reception underscores this review’s central argument: moral revulsion, however sincere, is not a strategy. Only a scientific, class‑based programme can confront the forces responsible for genocide, and that is precisely what the cultural establishment cannot tolerate.

What is to be done: From revulsion to revolutionary consciousness

None of this dismisses El Akkad’s sincerity or the genuine emotion the book has evoked. The disgust millions feel toward the political and media establishment is a healthy, progressive development. It marks a profound shift in consciousness: a recognition that the institutions long presented as guardians of democracy, human rights and liberal values have revealed themselves as instruments of imperialist violence. The revulsion is real, deep and justified. But disgust, however sincere, must become consciousness.

The lesson of Gaza is not that “the West” has lost its soul. It is that imperialism, in its death agony, is driving toward ever greater barbarism, including world war. The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration but a warning: a demonstration of what the ruling class is prepared to do as it confronts economic crisis, geopolitical rivalry and mounting social opposition at home. The same governments that levelled Gaza are preparing for confrontation with Russia and China, expanding military budgets, militarising society and attacking democratic rights. The logic of imperialism inexorably leads to catastrophe.

Only the international working class, mobilised independently of all capitalist parties on a socialist programme, can stop it. As the WSWS editorial board has stated, the genocidal war in Gaza “can only be stopped through the unified and revolutionary action of the international working class.” This is not a rhetorical flourish but a scientific assessment of social forces. The working class, bound together across borders by global production, possesses both the objective interest and the collective power to halt the machinery of war. Dockworkers refusing to load arms shipments, autoworkers striking against militarised austerity, students defying police repression- these actions point toward the real agency capable of ending imperialist barbarism.

El Akkad’s book records the moment when a section of the liberal intelligentsia saw the abyss. But seeing the abyss is not the same as understanding it. And understanding it is not the same as developing the political perspective required to overcome it. The liberal intelligentsia recoils from genocide but remains ideologically tethered to the Democratic Party, identity politics and the moral language of individual witness. It mourns the collapse of liberal ideals but cannot conceive of a world beyond capitalism. Its despair stems from its political limitations.

The task is to explain how humanity reached the edge of the abyss and how it can escape. That requires not moral revulsion but a scientific understanding of the state’s class character, the nature of imperialism, and the historical role of the working class. It requires building a revolutionary leadership capable of turning outrage into strategy, protest into power, and moral clarity into political action. Only by consciously mobilising the international working class can we bring the profit system to its knees and finally end the barbarism it generates.

Bibliography

Primary Text

  • El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

Statements, Lectures, and Editorials

  • North, David. “The Political Meaning of the Self‑Immolation of Aaron Bushnell.” Lecture delivered at the University of Michigan, March 2024.
  • World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board. “Mobilise the Working Class to Stop the Gaza Genocide.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023.
  • North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political and Social Foundations of the January 6 Coup Attempt. Mehring Books, 2022.
  • North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Mehring Books, 1988.

WSWS Coverage of Gaza and Imperialism

  • Grey, Andre Damon, et al. “The US‑Backed Israeli Genocide in Gaza.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023–2025.
  • Kishore, Joseph. “The Role of the Working Class in the Fight Against Imperialist War.” World Socialist Web Site, 2024.
  • Van Auken, Bill. “US Imperialism and the Middle East: A Century of Intervention.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023.

Historical and Theoretical Works on Imperialism

  • Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.
  • Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. 1913.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The War and the International. 1914.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program. 1938.

Works on Liberalism, Identity Politics, and the Crisis of the Intelligentsia

  • Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New Press, 2000.
  • Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
  • Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. W. W. Norton, 1995.

Journalistic and Political Context

  • Human Rights Watch. Israel/Palestine: Events of 2023–2025. HRW Annual Reports.
  • United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Gaza Situation Reports, 2023–2025.

The Holocaust: A New History Paperback – 1 Jun. 2009 by Doris Bergen – The History Press

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In the opinion, not of evil men, but of the best men, no belief which is contrary to truth can be helpful to. . .

John Stuart Mill

“Palestine appears a tragic mirage, Biro-bidjan a bureaucratic farce. The Kremlin refuses to accept refugees. The “anti-fascist” congresses of old ladies and young careerists do not have the slightest importance. Now more than ever, the fate of the Jewish people—not only their political but also their physical fate—is indissolubly linked with the emancipating struggle of the international proletariat. Only audacious mobilization of the workers against reaction, creation of workers’ militia, direct physical resistance to the fascist gangs, increasing self-confidence, activity and audacity on the part of all the oppressed can provoke a change in the relation of forces, stop the world wave of fascism, and open a new chapter in the history of humanity.”

Leon Trotsky

“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.”

― Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question

This book is not without merit. Her study is well-researched using new sources which draw on the testimonies of both survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as rare photographs, to reveal the global nature of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.

Bergen’s book adds to an already very crowded market. In his excellent review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Marxist writer David North made the following perceptive point: “For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. It is true that a vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]

I want to say that Bergen attempts to answer the question “Why did it happen posed by North, but she does not even come close. Bergen’s work is strong on empirical data and incorporates the ‘voices’ of the Holocaust, but light on analysis. She says next to nothing about the betrayals of the leadership of both the Stalinist German Communist Party and the German Social Democratic Party, which allowed not only Hitler to come to power without a shot being fired and led to the crushing of the workers’ movement, which was a prerequisite for the Nazis to murder 6 million jews.

Given the extent of her research and the fact that she makes little attempt to examine the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy, it is not surprising that Bergen claims that there was little resistance to the rise of the Nazis to power. Daniel Goldhagen, who praises the book on its back cover, makes a similar point in his book.

Goldhagen writes: The Nazi German revolution … was an unusual revolution in that, domestically, it was being realised—the repression of the political left in the first few years notwithstanding—without massive coercion and violence. … By and large, it was a peaceful revolution willingly acquiesced to by the German people. Domestically, the Nazi German revolution was, on the whole, consensual.

David North replies, “Until I read those words, I had been inclined to look upon Goldhagen as a rather sad and somewhat pathetic figure, a young man whose study of the fate of European Jewry had left him intellectually, if not emotionally, traumatised. However, in this paragraph, something alarming emerges. Except for its treatment of the Jews, the Nazi “revolution”—Goldhagen does not use the word “counterrevolution”—was a rather benign affair. His reference to the “repression of the political left” is inserted between hyphens, suggesting that it was not all too big a deal. The claim that the Nazi conquest of power was “a peaceful revolution willingly acquiesced to by the German people” is a despicable falsification. What Goldhagen refers to as the “repression of the political left” consisted, in fact, of the physical destruction of mass socialist parties that represented the hopes and aspirations of millions of workers and the best elements of the German intelligentsia for a just and decent world. German socialism was not only a political movement: it was, for all its internal contradictions, both the inspirer and expression of a flowering of human intellect and culture. Its destruction required the barbaric methods in which the Nazis excelled.”[2]

Given the right-wing nature of Goldhagen’s work, if this were my book, I would not have him anywhere near it. There is no need for me to examine Goldhagen’s previous historiography on the matter of Genocide, as this has been more than ably covered by others, such as David North and Daniel Finkelstein.[3] It would, however, be remiss of me not to discuss recent pronouncements by several historians, including Goldhagen, on the ongoing Genocide carried out by the fascist Israeli government in Gaza.

In a recent well-written and thoughtful article, the historian Shira Klein wrote, “A chasm has formed between Holocaust scholars concerning Israel/Palestine, deepening immeasurably since 7 October 2023. Unlike previous controversies in the field, the divide is not just historical or methodological; it revolves around academics’ role in the world today, particularly the public stand they choose to take on Palestine/Israel and Zionism. Two main camps have formed. Put reductively, one camp defends Israel, while the other defends Palestinians, although differences between individual scholars within each camp make for more of a spectrum than a clear-cut divide. How, despite a diversity of ideas and foci within each camp, did two academic-political antipodes solidify over several decades, and how has 7 October and the ensuing war widened the rift between them?[4]

Klein makes the point that scholars supporting Israeli war aggression is nothing new and dates back to the illegal formation of the Israeli state.  What is a relatively new phenomenon is the equating of criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza with anti-Semitism.  One of the leaders of this new movement is Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen, following the 11 September 2001 attack, wrote that “the internet and television’s biased stories and inflammatory images of Palestinian suffering” were nothing but “globalised antisemitism.” According to Goldhagen. Europe had exported its classical racist and Nazi anti-semitism.to Arab countries, which they applied to Israel and Jews in general.” Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to Europe and, using the United Nations and other international institutions, to different countries around the world.”15 In 2006, while Israel was curtailing Palestinians’ movement with a massive separation barrier, Goldhagen contended that “hostility to Israel is not, and never was, based on Israel’s policies.”[5]

In his book The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide, David North opposes vehemently the slander that opposition to Israel’s genocide is antisemitic, saying this claim is absurd, given the significant participation of so many Jewish people in the anti-genocide protests—including, one could add, a developing movement within Israel itself.

He also points out the brazen hypocrisy of the howls of “antisemitism” given the “open alliance of the imperialist powers with the regime in Ukraine, whose principal national hero, Stepan Bandera, was a vicious fascist and antisemite, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews of Ukraine. The establishment of the Zionist state was not only a tragedy for the Palestinians; it was, and is, a tragedy for the Jewish people as well. Zionism never was, and is not today, a solution to the historic oppression and persecution of the Jewish people.”

He quotes the assessment of Leon Trotsky, who warned in 1938 that the Jews faced the threat of “physical extermination” in the coming war, and declared in July 1940, one year after World War II had begun: “ The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it was: a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. … Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system”.[6]

Given that Bergen has not elaborated her position openly in the press as regards the Israeli genocide, it is perhaps not surprising that she has not distanced herself from Goldhagen’s blatant right-wing stance.

She did, however, sign The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which, according to its website, “ Is a tool to identify, confront and raise awareness about antisemitism as it manifests in countries around the world today. It includes a preamble, definition, and a set of 15 guidelines that provide detailed guidance for those seeking to recognise antisemitism to craft responses. It was developed by a group of scholars in the fields of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies to address a growing challenge: providing clear guidance on how to identify and combat antisemitism while protecting free expression. Initially signed by 210 scholars, it now has around 370 signatories.[7]

[1] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[3] https://newleftreview.org/issues/i224/articles/norman-finkelstein-daniel-jonah-goldhagen-s-crazy-thesis-a-critique-of-hitler-s-willing-executioners.pdf

[4]  The Growing Rift between Holocaust Scholars over Israel/

Palestine http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14623528.2024.2448061

[5] Daniel Goldhagen, “The Radical Politics of Islamic Fundamentalism,” SPME, 13 March 2006, https://spme.org/

[6] The Only Salvation for the Jews (July 1940) The Militant, Vol. X No. 35, 31 August 1946, p.www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1946/v10n35/trotsky.htm

[7] https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/