“Slavery in the Midst of Revolution”: Understanding the British Far Left after October 7th, 2023

"Slavery in the Midst of Revolution"1:Understanding the British Far Left after October 7th, 2023 Colin Shindler (bio) Keywords October 7, Israel, Hamas, British far Left, New Left, Antisemitism, Zionism, "settler-colonialism", Anglo Jewry Kaddish2 Yitgadal V'yitkadash Shmei RabaAnd no one cameMany thousands called Him on Shabbat morningCrying His name out loudBegging Him with tears just to comeBut He ceased from all His workNo God cameAnd no God calmedOnly Satan celebrated uninterrupted ISRAEL AS PART OF THE DIASPORA 7 October 2023 was the day when Israel became part of the Diaspora. It was the day when Zionism's historic task to protect Zion—the Land of Israel as a refuge for persecuted Jews—failed. 'Never Again' became instead a hollow slogan. For many Jews, it was a question of history repeating itself—from the Khmelnytsky massacre in Ukraine in 1648 to the Farhud in Iraq in 1941. A fatalistic return to the past. They understood 7 October as a pogrom3 of ethnic cleansing. The events of 7 October have given rise to the poetry of anguish—as such events have done in the past. End Page 47 Bialik wrote after the Kishinev pogrom in 1903: "And the pain is so very, very great! There was a man who died before his time, leaving his song unfinished. He had another song to sing, and now it's gone, gone forever".4 Uri Zvi Greenberg, the poet of twentieth century Jewish suffering, similarly wrote about the Jews in a time of persecution in a Lament for the Solitary Sheep. Not in the fields did the murderers find my Jewish sister,as the wolf finds the solitary sheep, but at home.Over streets and houses of her birthplaceher cry carried.5 Even dogs, Greenberg wrote, were treated better than Jews. They pity a dog, stroke, even kiss itlike a much-loved baby, pampered at home6 1881 AND 2023 Many Ashkenazi Jews in the UK can trace their own history back to the pogroms of 1881 which followed the assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II in St. Petersburg in March of that year. The sole Jew who was implicated in the deed, Gesia Gelfman, was elevated to the role of devious mastermind. This was followed by the first pogrom in mid-April 1881 in Elisavetgrad and by the discriminatory May Laws which were passed during the following year. All this—and in particular the subsequent repression under Tsar Aleksandr III—led to a large-scale Jewish migration to the United Kingdom. Simon Dubnov argued that the migrations after 1881 were comparable only to those which followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.7 In 1881, major revolutionary groups such as the Narodnaya Volya and the Chernyi Peredel remained on the sidelines and refused to condemn the pogromshchiki (the perpetrators of the pogroms) because they did not wish to alienate them from the central cause of overthrowing the Romanovs. The narodniks of 1881 were entrapped by the tradition of worshipping 'the people'. Many on the far Left in 1881 were privately highly condemnatory of the actions of the pogromshchiki who saw the Jews as Christ-killers, money-lenders and exploiters of the poor and vulnerable. Their inaction resided in the logic of political expediency and that higher principles were at stake—and this demanded silence. Popular fury against the Jews was End Page 48 seen as 'a respectable form of class war'.8 The killing of Jews was seen as a sad necessity in the service of the greater good of the revolution and the liberation of the masses. The open antisemitism of figures such as the Ukrainian Gerasim Romanenko, who resurrected the imagery of the Jew-kulak9 seemed to have been much more the exception than the rule. Adapting Bakunin's theory of social anarchism, the far left in Tsarist Russia believed that the violence of 'revolutionary antisemitism' could be redirected towards the authorities. Pavel Akselrod, the son of a Jewish innkeeper in the Bryansk region, was an early advocate of change in Russia in the 1870s. He was initially influenced by Lasalle and...