The story of British Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s is usually framed as a one-way journey: Eastern European Jews fleeing Tsarist violence and civil war pogroms, arriving on the shores to drain malarial marshes and establish collective settlements. And for good reason. Yet in the late autumn of 1927, there was an extraordinary exception.

Several dozen young Jewish men and women boarded ships sailing not towards Palestine, but away from it. They were physically tough from years of manual labour in the Galilee and from working on the Tiberias highway. Their everyday language was modern Hebrew. They were neither disillusioned bourgeois city-dwellers nor agitators deported by the British, but the elite shock-troops of the Zionist labour movement leaving Palestine to build a collective farm in the Soviet Union.

In an era when leaving Palestine – known as yerida ('descent') – was condemned by the Zionist leadership as national treason, their departure was an act of radical ideological defiance. They believed they were rescuing the soul of their project by transplanting the kibbutz to the only country in the world where the working class had taken state power.

The Vanguard of Labour

The men and women who took this step belonged to the left wing of Gedud HaAvoda – the Yosef Trumpeldor Labour Battalion. The battalion was the legendary backbone of early Labour Zionism. Founded in the summer of 1920, it took the name of Trumpeldor, the one-armed Russian military hero killed defending the northern border outpost of Tel Hai. Trumpeldor’s death had turned him into the most well-known martyr of armed Jewish self-defence and labour.

The Gedud operated as a mobile, nationwide commune. Its members rejected the notion of individual, isolated kibbutzim. Instead, they functioned with an uncompromising, syndicalist discipline, demanding a single countrywide collective with a centrally pooled treasury. All wages – from quarrying stone in Jerusalem and paving roads in Tiberias to farming the Jezreel Valley – went straight into a common pot, divided strictly equally.

Throughout the early 1920s, the battalion laid the physical infrastructure of Jewish settlement, founding flagship collective settlements like Ein Harod and Tel Yosef. They were celebrated as the “New Jews”: self-reliant, physically robust proletarians conquering the land through direct manual labour.

Turning Against the Yishuv

By the mid-1920s, an ideological conflict shattered the Labour Battalion. The crisis was triggered by a severe economic depression that struck Mandatory Palestine in 1926 and 1927, collapsing construction and creating mass unemployment. Immigration plummeted from a peak of nearly 34,000 in 1925 to barely 2,700 in 1927. For the first time under British rule, net migration turned negative: over 5,000 Jews left the country that year, nearly double the number who arrived.

Yet for the left-wing faction of the Gedud, led by their charismatic founding figure Menachem Elkind, the problem was not merely economic hardship. It was moral and political.

Elkind and his cadre watched future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s political party, Achdut HaAvoda, alongside the Histadrut trade union federation, consolidate a centralised, bureaucratic monopoly over the economy of the Yishuv – the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine. To enforce Jewish employment, Ben-Gurion and the Histadrut aggressively instituted the doctrine of “Hebrew Labour” (avoda ivrit), stationing union pickets at citrus groves, Haifa railway yards, and urban building sites to forcefully prevent the hiring of unorganised Arab fellahin.

To Elkind’s internationalism, this was an unforgivable betrayal of socialist principles that sabotaged any prospect of joint class solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers. The Zionist establishment under figures like Ben-Gurion, he argued, was not building a shared socialist society; it was constructing a segregated, nationalist enclave operating under the protective umbrella of British imperialism.

When the Gedud formally split in December 1926, Elkind’s left-wing minority was ostracised. They were expelled from the labour federation, systematically blacklisted from municipal and private employment, and denied basic building contracts. The labour leadership demanded complete political submission to Achdut HaAvoda’s party directives.

Elkind’s response was unprecedented: if a true, non-chauvinistic socialist commune could not be built under British colonial rule in Palestine, they would transport the entire experiment to the one place where socialism was being built.

KOMZET

To the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow, Elkind’s approach was a propaganda gift. The young Soviet state was locked in an ideological war against Zionism, which the Comintern routinely denounced as an instrument of British foreign policy.

Simultaneously, Moscow was attempting to solve its own domestic “Jewish Question”. With the winding down of the New Economic Policy (NEP) – Lenin’s tactical, temporary concession to limited private trade and small-scale capitalism – the regime moved to eliminate the market economy entirely. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish traders and craftsmen in the former Pale were classified as lishentsy – “class-alien” citizens stripped of citizenship rights and basic ration allocations. To integrate them into the planned socialist economy by transforming them into agricultural labourers, the state created KOMZET (the Committee for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land) in 1924, chaired by Old Bolshevik Pyotr Smidovich.

Financed by millions of dollars from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee – operating inside the USSR as the Agro-Joint under agronomist Dr Joseph Rosen – the Soviets were establishing vast Jewish collective farm settlements across southern Ukraine and Crimea. Modern American Caterpillar tractors, deep-well drilling rigs, and certified seed stocks were transforming the region.

For Moscow, receiving seasoned, politically disciplined agricultural pioneers who had rejected Palestine in favour of the USSR proved that Soviet productivisation was winning the ideological argument against Zionism. KOMZET approved the plan, allocating 1,200 hectares of arable soil near Saky in western Crimea for roughly 60 to 80 members of the left-Gedud and their young families.

The Kibbutz in Crimea

On arrival by train near the Crimean port of Yevpatoria, this cadre of seasoned pioneers immediately collided with Soviet linguistic orthodoxy. The regime’s Jewish Section, the Evsektsiya, was aggressively suppressing Hebrew as a counter-revolutionary tongue and enforcing Yiddish as the only permissible Jewish language.

The settlers had no intention of turning back the linguistic clock, nor would they assimilate into Russian. While many members – including the pioneer and future author Shira Gorshman – still spoke and wrote naturally in Yiddish, the leadership remained fiercely committed to modern Hebrew as the spoken language of the collective.

Their solution was political camouflage. They named their commune Vojo Nova – Esperanto for “The New Way” – taking their title from the artificial, universal language created in the late nineteenth century by L. L. Zamenhof to foster borderless human fraternity. In the 1920s, Esperanto enjoyed widespread ideological prestige across the Soviet Union as the proposed neutral tongue of the global proletariat.

The internationalist sign on the front gate satisfied Bolshevik inspectors, but behind it, Vojo Nova retained the culture and ethos of the Yishuv. The commune continued to conduct committee meetings, organise work rotas, and raise its children largely in Hebrew, despite official discouragement, even as daily life on the farm fostered a vibrant Yiddish literary output.

Unlike local lishentsy who struggled with the brutal transition to farming, the Vojo Nova pioneers were experts. They introduced advanced poultry farming, planted extensive vineyards, drilled deep wells, and operated sophisticated Agro-Joint machinery.

Crucially, they organised the settlement on kibbutz lines. They built a central communal dining hall, established a collective children’s house where infants were raised together, pooled all earnings into a single communal purse, and issued clothing from a shared depot. For several years, the Soviet press actively celebrated Vojo Nova as a shining showcase of Jewish agricultural reconstruction, while avant-garde artists and Yiddish writers visited to document the pioneers harvesting grain beneath the Crimean sun.

From Kibbutz to Kolkhoz

The paradox of running an autonomous, Hebrew-speaking commune could not survive the harsh political climate of the 1930s.

Even before state intervention, ideological rifts had begun fracturing the collective from within, as members clashed over whether to integrate fully into the Soviet political apparatus or defend their communal autonomy. With the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, nationwide collectivisation closed the debate. The idea of an independent, self-governing commune that set its own rules, maintained foreign ties, and pooled its own resources became an intolerable political heresy in a centralised command economy.

Between 1934 and 1935, Soviet authorities systematically dismantled Vojo Nova’s kibbutz infrastructure. The communal children’s house was shut down, the common dining hall was reorganised into a standard canteen, and state-appointed managers took control of production targets. The commune was formally absorbed into the state system as a collective farm (kolkhoz) and renamed Druzhba Narodov (“Brotherhood of Nations”), with Slavic and Crimean Tatar families moved into the settlement to dilute its distinct identity.

With political commissars installed to oversee daily life, the commune lost its remaining independence. Realising their foreign background had become a deadly liability under tightening state surveillance, several key leaders, including Menachem Elkind, left Crimea to seek anonymity in the industrial factories of Moscow and Leningrad.

Firing Squads and the Holocaust

When the mass repressions under Stalin swept the USSR in 1937, the former Palestinian pioneers were trapped in the crosshairs of the NKVD – the Soviet secret police. Their past – which had once been their greatest political asset – became an open-and-shut indictment of treason. Under Article 58, a past in British-administered Palestine, fluency in Hebrew, or letters from abroad were treated as proof of espionage and counter-revolutionary activity.

Menachem Elkind was arrested in Moscow in 1937. Denounced as an agent of British intelligence and a clandestine counter-revolutionary Zionist, he was interrogated, condemned by a military tribunal, and executed by firing squad in 1938. Dozens of other former Gedud members were arrested across the country, disappearing into the labour camps of the Gulag.

For the small remnant of original pioneers and their children who remained on the Crimean farm, the final chapter was swift and brutal. In the autumn of 1941, Nazi forces overran the Crimean peninsula. The extermination squads of Einsatzgruppe D swept through the area. The Jewish farmers of Druzhba Narodov – the men and women who had sailed away from Palestine fourteen years earlier in search of an internationalist socialist haven – were marched to anti-tank ditches outside the villages and murdered alongside thousands of local Crimean Jews.

The Mirage of the Promised Land

The story of Vojo Nova is one of the many tragic episodes in the Jewish history of the period. The pioneers of the left-Gedud did not leave Palestine out of weariness or cowardice; they left out of an uncompromising commitment to socialist internationalism.

They genuinely believed that the national boundaries of Mandatory Palestine were too narrow for the universal emancipation of humanity. By betting their lives on the Soviet Union, they traded the colonial contradictions of the British Empire for the lethal paranoia of Stalin’s rule, leaving behind an important reminder that the story of early Jewish radicalism is far more complex and perilous than most socialists today care to know.

For those interested in exploring the history of Vojo Nova and the Crimean project further, Jonathan Dekel-Chen’s Farming the Red Land (Yale University Press) and Anita Shapira’s Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist (Cambridge University Press) are essential reading.

“Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. [...] Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.” – V.I. Lenin, “On Anti-Jewish Pogroms”, 29 March 1919

On 29 March 1919, Vladimir Lenin – the leader of the Bolsheviks and head of the newly established Soviet government – recorded an address against antisemitism inside a cold Kremlin room. He spoke amidst the brutal Russian Civil War, which had erupted across the former empire immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October Revolution of 1917.

The room was unheated due to the double stranglehold of the conflict: an economic embargo enforced by Allied naval fleets in the Baltic and Black Seas, combined with White Army forces cutting off Moscow from its primary domestic coal and oil fields in the Donbas and Baku. Lenin stood facing a large funnel-shaped receiver mounted on a wooden frame, working alongside sound engineer August Kibart. Because electrical recording did not yet exist, Lenin kept close to the apparatus, projecting his voice down the funnel to vibrate a diaphragm that carved a groove into a rotating wax master disc – creating a shellac pressing.

The physical format imposed a strict limit: Kibart’s disc held roughly three minutes of audio before the stylus reached the centre. Lenin spoke rapidly, completing the address in two minutes and twenty-one seconds.

This recording was one of thirteen addresses Lenin made for Tsentropechat – the central state distribution agency – between 1919 and 1921. During those same March 1919 sessions, he recorded a tribute to Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik administrator of Jewish heritage who had died of Spanish influenza barely two weeks earlier, alongside speeches marking the founding of the Communist International (Comintern), appeals to the Red Army, and lectures on Soviet power.

Why had they recorded an explicit condemnation of anti-Jewish violence alongside these foundational state broadcasts? Because for a state operating under conditions of economic breakdown, antisemitism was not merely an ideological error – it was a lethal force of peasant backwardness that threatened to dissolve the nascent state from within.

The Mobile Propaganda Units

These recordings were not aimed at counter-revolutionary forces; they were produced for internal consumption within the Soviet state’s own military and civilian base.

The young republic faced an immediate crisis: the newly mobilised Red Army was largely composed of an illiterate peasantry whose deep rural prejudices were ignited as they entered the former Pale of Settlement – where class tensions between grain producers and urban middlemen were easily inflamed by war, inflation, and forced requisitioning into traditional antisemitism. As these recruits reached the front lines in Ukraine, reports reached Moscow of Red Army units turning their weapons on local Jewish populations, blaming them for the starvation and collapse brought on by the war.

Traditional print media could not solve the problem in a country with high rates of illiteracy among rural conscripts. Oral propaganda became an essential tool of state-building, requiring the creation of a nationalised recording apparatus virtually from scratch amidst economic breakdown.

Once the wax masters were cut in the Kremlin, they were dispatched to the Aprelevka plant outside Moscow. Formerly the Fabrika Metropol – a private enterprise founded by German businessmen in 1910 – the facility had been nationalised by the Bolsheviks to serve as the industrial engine for state record manufacturing. Operating under severe shortages of raw materials, electricity, and imported shellac, worker committees at Aprelevka pressed thousands of brittle physical discs from Lenin’s master recordings.

These discs were distributed via agit-trains and agit-steamers – mobile propaganda units equipped with printing presses, film projectors, newsstands, and theatrical troupes that traversed the railway networks of the Civil War. Trains like the V.I. Lenin and the Red Star brought the central political machinery of the state directly to isolated provincial outposts.

At railway sidings, troop encampments, and market squares, Bolshevik agitators set up spring-driven, wind-up gramophones on wooden crates. For audiences outside the major cities who had never heard a member of the government speak, the recorded voice was a modern wonder bringing the sound of the new state – the future – to them. Lenin’s speech linked antisemitism to the Tsarist old regime, framing anti-Jewish violence as a counter-revolutionary act designed to fracture working-class unity and destroy the “fighting alliance” that held the Red Army together.

Propaganda, the Firing Squad, and Historical Memory

A two-minute speech on a shellac disc could not instantly eradicate long-standing frictions, and propaganda alone could not halt the breakdown of military discipline on remote fronts.

Between 1918 and 1921, the Jewish population across the former Pale of Settlement in Ukraine became the target of mass violence. Trapped between invading White armies, nationalist militias, autonomous peasant warlords, and units of the Red Army, Jewish communities were subjected to over 1,200 individual pogroms. Modern estimates place the total deaths between 50,000 and 150,000, accompanied by widespread destruction of communal property and displacement.

Crucially, these exact same towns and ravines across Ukraine would become the primary sites of mass extermination during the “Holocaust by Bullets” two decades later, where Nazi Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators wiped out the surviving Jewish populations of the region.

Over 90 per cent of Civil War massacres were perpetrated by non-Soviet forces – principally General Denikin’s White Guard and the nationalist troops of Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR). UPR forces alone were responsible for roughly two-fifths of all recorded attacks.

Petliura’s historical legacy remains one of the most hotly contested issues of the Civil War era. In present-day Ukraine, he and the UPR have undergone a thorough state rehabilitation. Honoured with street names, monuments, and state commemorations, he is officially framed as a founding father of modern Ukrainian independence and a symbol of resistance against Russian aggression. Modern Ukrainian historiography argues that Petliura did not personally order the pogroms, pointing to government proclamations against violence and the creation of a Ministry for Jewish Affairs as evidence that the massacres were carried out by autonomous warlords (otamans) beyond the practical control of a collapsing central state.

However, as Supreme Commander (Chief Otaman), Petliura bore direct political responsibility for atrocities committed by forces wearing his government’s uniform. When he was assassinated in Paris in 1926 by Sholem Schwarzbard – a Jewish anarchist who had lost his family in the Ukrainian massacres – a French jury acquitted Schwarzbard after hearing extensive testimony detailing the carnage. The verdict transformed Petliura into a national martyr for Ukrainian émigrés and a primary symbol of Civil War terror for Jewish communities.

While the anti-Bolshevik camps remained largely unpoliced from within, the Soviet leadership took a drastically different approach to antisemitism in its own ranks – recognising that unchecked pogroms meant the total dissolution of army discipline. The Bolshevik high command was forced to confront the fact that rebellious Red Army soldiers, particularly co-opted peasant detachments and former Tsarist conscripts, were repeatedly carrying out pogroms while using slogans that blended class warfare with antisemitism: “Death to the Yids and Communists, long live Soviet power!”

To the rural conscripts who made up the bulk of the Red Army, “Soviet power” represented the local worker and peasant councils that granted them land rights, while “Communists” represented the urban party apparatus, political commissars, and grain-requisitioning squads sent from Moscow – a central authority they viewed through the lens of traditional antisemitism.

When propaganda failed to maintain discipline, the state deployed ruthless legal force. On 27 July 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) enacted a decree drafted by Semyon Dimanshtein, head of the Jewish Commissariat, and personally amended by Lenin. The decree formally instructed all Soviet institutions to uproot antisemitism, culminating in Lenin’s directive that “pogromists and pogrom-agitators are to be placed outside the law.”

Being placed outside the law effectively made antisemitic agitation a capital offence.

The ultimate test came in the autumn of 1920 during the retreat from Poland. Elements of Semyon Budyonny’s famed 1st Cavalry Army (Konarmiya) – most notably the 6th Cavalry Division – went on a bloody rampage through Ukrainian towns like Lyubar, Sokal, and Rogachev, slaughtering civilians and pillaging shtetls.

The nature of the problem was laid bare by the Jewish writer Isaac Babel, who was embedded as a war correspondent with Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army. In his 1920 Diary, he captured the violence: “A Jewish pogrom... torture, they cut out tongues, wailing over the whole town square.”

The high command’s response was swift and merciless. Frontline military tribunals and Special Departments (Osoby Otdel) of the Cheka convened emergency courts-martial on railway platforms.

Dozens of Red Army soldiers – including veteran commanders and commissars who had turned a blind eye – were stripped of their uniforms and executed by firing squad in front of their assembled regiments. Entire rogue brigades were forcibly disbanded and disarmed. The state made its central authority clear: while the revolution would forgive tactical retreats, it would shoot its own soldiers for anti-Jewish violence to maintain the integrity of the Red Army.

The Shift to Secular Assimilation

By 1921, the military phase of the conflict drew to a close. The Bolsheviks secured victory across the former empire, the Western Allied blockade was lifted, and the physical horror of the Civil War pogroms came to an end.

With the military threat neutralised, the Soviet state’s campaign against antisemitism shifted from physical protection and frontline discipline to state-driven social engineering and modernisation.

Through the Yevsektsiya – the Jewish section of the Communist Party – the regime sought to integrate Jewish populations into the secular, industrial apparatus of the Soviet state. Public expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice remained illegal. During the 1920s, Soviet courts prosecuted citizens under these statutes for using antisemitic slurs in public, publishing anti-Jewish pamphlets, or making antisemitic speeches at factory meetings – treating public antisemitism not merely as a moral issue or personal abuse, but as counter-revolutionary agitation designed to fracture working-class solidarity. Meanwhile, state-funded Yiddish schools, newspapers, and national theatres flourished as a secular alternative to traditional religious life.

This state protection was inseparable from the wider Soviet project. In tandem with a broader assault on all faiths – most notably the Russian Orthodox Church – the regime systematically squeezed Jewish religious institutions. It condemned Hebrew as a reactionary language, banned religious education, and shuttered synagogues, viewing itself not as persecuting an ethnic minority, but as forcibly integrating a “backward” population out of feudal obscurantism and into the secular, industrial structures of a modern state. By the time the Yevsektsiya was disbanded in 1930, the state’s initial defence of Jewish lives against pogrom violence had fulfilled its purpose – leaving behind a regime committed to secular assimilation and officially opposed to antisemitism, for the time being at least.

Further Reading:

• V.I. Lenin, “On Anti-Jewish Pogroms” (Recorded 29 March 1919), in Lenin on the Jewish Question, ed. by Hyman Lumer (New York: International Publishers, 1974).

• Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

• Christopher Gilley, “Was Symon Petliura ‘an antisemite who massacred Jews during a time of war’?”, openDemocracy (13 February 2019).

The internationalist backbone of British socialism was partly forged in the sweatshops and print rooms of London’s East End at the turn of the 20^th century. Before the birth of the Labour Party and trade unions as we know them, activists of the emergent modern labour movement spoke Yiddish, built strategic alliances across the London docks, and carried out clandestine logistics for Lenin. This disciplined network of politicised refugees fought the jingoism and antisemitism of the early British left and in doing so laid the foundations for the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s and 1940s.

Eleanor Marx: “I am a Jewess”

As the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor grew up in London while Volume I of Das Kapital was being written. Imbibing her father’s political outlook, she progressed from a childhood immersed in radical theory to become his secretary and researcher. Following his death in 1883, she spent four years working alongside Friedrich Engels to prepare his legacy for the world – painstakingly tracking down original British sources, verifying citations, and indexing manuscripts to help produce the definitive first English edition of Das Kapital in 1887.

As much as she took her father’s work forward, Eleanor was an independent thinker. She broke sharply from her father’s early writing in his 1844 essay Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question), which had controversially reduced Jewish identity to commercial huckstering and finance. While her father’s early thesis relied on the premise that Jewish life was synonymous with commerce, Eleanor’s lived experience in the East End exposed a destitute, wage-earning proletariat that rendered that early essay wrong. Confronted by rising anti-immigrant antisemitism in London, she consciously unassimilated herself. Reclaiming an identity her family had left behind, she proudly declared at meetings to East End audiences, “I am a Jewess.”

Having already served on the executive of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and co-founded the Socialist League, she became one of the prime movers behind the New Unionism wave of industrial militancy in the late 1880s. This broke the exclusive model of traditional craft unions by targeting the vast, unprotected underclass of casual, unskilled labourers. She founded the first women’s branch of the gas workers union and unionised hundreds of casualised female onion skinners at the Crosse & Blackwell plants, where they worked in brutal conditions.

To embed herself in the world of the Jewish working-class, Eleanor, who was fluent in several languages, learned spoken Yiddish, relying on its close linguistic ties to German to lecture and agitate on the streets of Whitechapel. Believing that employers exploited the division between Jew and Gentile to depress wages, she worked to bridge the gap between Jewish garment workers and the predominantly Irish Catholic labour force on the London docks. Eleanor’s life and tireless organising were cut tragically short when she took her own life in March 1898, but the cross-communal bonds she championed had already begun to take root.

James Connolly, the East End fixers, and the 1902 Dublin Election

At the turn of the century, a deep divide opened up at the national and local level of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which had been established as the first Marxist political party in Britain. The leadership of the SDF under H.M. Hyndman frequently succumbed to antisemitism by explaining international finance as a Jewish conspiracy. Yet on the ground in Whitechapel and Stepney, local Marxist militants rejected the leadership’s view and built a formidable Yiddish-speaking revolutionary network.

The impact of this localised work was soon noticed across the water. Seeking to break new ground ahead of the 1902 Dublin municipal elections, the pioneering Irish Marxist James Connolly reached out to the Whitechapel branch to help him connect with local immigrant Jews. Standing for the Wood Quay ward under the banner of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP), at a time when mainstream politicians frequently dabbled in xenophobia, Connolly was uncompromisingly hostile to antisemitism, identifying it, just as Eleanor Marx had, as a weapon of class rule.

The operational arm of this cross-border alliance was Boris Kahan. Serving as the Secretary of the SDF’s East London Jewish Branch – and an underground operator who, the following year, would meet and coordinate with Lenin during the latter's first visits to the East End – the Kiev-born political refugee stepped forward to bridge the linguistic gap for a distinct community of Lithuanian Jewish refugees who had recently settled in the South Circular Road area – rapidly becoming known as Dublin’s “Little Jerusalem” – after fleeing Tsarist persecution.

Utilising the SDF’s Yiddish presses, Kahan framed the leaflet not as a statement from Connolly himself, but as a collective appeal from British Jewish workers urging solidarity with the Irish socialist candidate. After attacking landlordism and antisemitism, the leaflet concluded:

“.. a few words to you, Jewish workers of Dublin... No matter how small your numbers, you can achieve much. Do your duty and work earnestly hand in hand with your Irish brothers. Canvass for votes, vote yourself and persuade others to vote on the 15th of January for the Socialist candidate, James Connolly. With Socialist greetings, [The East London Jewish Branch of the Social Democratic Federation].”

Anarchism and Yiddish

For all the work of the East End Marxists, they were not the biggest force on the left by a long way. They were eclipsed by the Yiddish speaking anarchist movement which operated as the main mass force on the ground among Jewish workers from the late 1880s onwards.

The defining figure of this revolutionary current was Rudolf Rocker. Arriving in London in 1895, the German non-Jew went further than Eleanor by thoroughly mastering the Hebrew script in which Yiddish is written so he could read, write, and single-handedly take over the editorship of Arbeter Fraint (The Worker’s Friend). Founded in 1885, the newspaper became a significant publication for local activists.

Under Rocker’s leadership, the anarchists were a potent industrial and cultural force, centred around the Jubilee Street Club in Whitechapel.

They proved their mettle by orchestrating widespread stoppages in the garment trade, culminating in the landmark 1912 tailors’ strike. More than just securing better wages for Jewish immigrants, the anarchist movement used these mass strikes to forge solidarity with the broader British labour movement, including striking English and Irish dockers.

The Workers’ Circle

The various Jewish left currents worked together in the creation of the Workers’ Circle (Arbeter Ring) in 1909. Established under the chairmanship of the Bundist bookbinder Morris Mindel, the Circle brought together anarchists, independent socialists, left-wing Labour Zionists from the Poale Zion movement, and Bundists – refugees of a mass Jewish revolutionary socialist movement originally founded in the Russian Empire which never operated in Britain as a party. This unique alliance brought these disparate factions – each maintaining their own autonomous branches that hosted regular political meetings, debates, and lectures – into a disciplined, grassroots mutual aid friendly society. Financed entirely by weekly member subscriptions, the Circle provided essential healthcare, sick benefits, and secular burials to refugees facing the punitive realities of the Edwardian Poor Law system.

The Birth of British Communism

The vibrant East End anarchist movement was broken by the outbreak of the First World War, as the government closed its presses and prominent leaders, including Rudolf Rocker, were arrested as enemy aliens, interned, and deported. With the libertarian left decapitated and scattered, the political momentum shifted toward organised Marxism. Then the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and overthrow of the Tsar offered an irresistible gravitational pull, alongside its concept of a disciplined party being a necessity.

The former activists of the East End SDF laid the direct intellectual and organisational groundwork for the future Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) upon its foundation in 1920. Boris Kahan’s sister, Zelda Kahan, emerged as a formidable Marxist theoretician in her own right. By 1912, she was elected to the executive of the British Socialist Party (BSP), leading its anti-war wing against the First World War. Alongside their brother-in-law Theodore Rothstein, the Kahan siblings formed the intellectual spine that fought the jingoistic tendencies of the British left, eventually steering the BSP to align with Lenin’s Third International – the Comintern – before submerging its identity to provide the main infrastructure and bulk of the membership for the newly founded CPGB.

The central figure was Theodore Rothstein. Settling in Britain in 1890, Rothstein was an important theorist on the SDF’s left wing, pioneering analyses of British imperialism and trade union history. When Hyndman used the SDF’s official organ to launch antisemitic attacks against the “Jew financier” during the Boer War, Rothstein led the fierce internal resistance from the grassroots, arguing that the leadership had abandoned a critique of capitalism in favour of racialised scapegoating.

Rothstein’s influence cannot be overemphasised; a close associate of Lenin during the latter’s London exile, he helped facilitate the local printing of the clandestine Russian revolutionary journal Iskra (The Spark). Following the revolution, Rothstein was invited to Moscow in 1920: the British government subsequently barred him from returning to his family in the UK. He remained in the Soviet Union, serving as the first Soviet Ambassador to Iran in 1921 and went on to direct the Institute of World Economy and Politics and edit the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

An Enduring Legacy

The lineage of this vanguard extended directly into the next generation of British communism, transforming the radical traditions of the turn of the century into the militant anti-fascism of the 1930s. The new cadres were not immigrants, but their children, and spoke English as their first language. The revolutionary Yiddish movement was over.

Andrew Rothstein, the son of Theodore Rothstein, remained behind in Britain and became a foundational member of the CPGB, serving as a leading theoretician and long-time London correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.

Mick Mindel, the son of the pioneering Workers’ Circle Bundist chairman Morris Mindel, grew up within this intense East End political crucible, emerging as an important CPGB activist and militant trade union leader within the Stepney garment trades.

It was through the broad networks of the Workers’ Circle and the CPGB that the Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-semitism was formed, which played such a crucial role in organising against Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts in the 1930s.

The era of the revolutionary Yiddish movement is long gone, but it left a legacy that helped build Britain’s industrial trade unions and anchored the modern anti-fascist movement.

On the Easter weekend of 1903, the streets of Kishinev, a provincial trading hub on the southwestern fringe of the Russian Empire, ran with blood. “The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep,” wrote the renowned Irish nationalist and veteran journalist Michael Davitt, who bypassed imperial censors to act as a primary conduit for the truth of the massacre to the Western world. “At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded... forty-nine Jews had been killed, hundreds had been wounded, and the homes of poor, industrious people completely gutted.”

To the outside world, Kishinev appeared to be a horrific, spontaneous eruption of medieval religious fury – the ancient, dark undercurrent of the deicide charge ignited by a local newspaper’s manufactured blood libel. However, Davitt’s published dispatches explicitly challenged this narrative of spontaneous religious sectarianism. Drawing on a lifetime of political activism – which included organising the Irish peasantry against British landlordism – the veteran journalist identified the pogrom as a deliberate mechanism of imperial control. In his analysis, the violence functioned as a calculated tool deployed by a decaying autocracy to fracture the burgeoning unity of the oppressed by turning one group of workers against another.

The lethal potency of this local violence relied on a calculated campaign of psychological warfare waged in print. Local agitators exploited the fact that the Jewish and Christian festivals overlapped, colliding Passover with the Orthodox Christian Holy Week. Capitalising on ancient prejudices that branded Jews – rather than the Romans – as Christ-killers, the local press flooded the city with fabricated reports claiming that a Christian boy had been ritually murdered and drained of his blood by his Jewish neighbours. By superimposing this absurd medieval blood libel onto modern anxieties of revolutionary subversion and industrial unrest, they transformed a season of religious devotion into a state-sanctioned hunting season, convincing an intoxicated mob that mass murder was an act of defence.

Faced with unprecedented international condemnation over the subsequent slaughter, local right-wing propagandists required an immediate ideological shield. They found that shield in France, behind the gilded facade of the Russian Embassy on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris.

The Laboratory of Forgery

It was from this diplomatic sanctuary that Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky ran the foreign intelligence bureau of the Okhrana – the Tsarist regime’s dreaded secret political police apparatus. Rachkovsky was no crude provincial enforcer; he was a highly sophisticated operative who spent nearly two decades embedding himself in the highest echelons of French political and journalistic society. Operating out of a discreet network of backrooms, he managed deep-cover informants, double agents, and rogue journalists. Under his stewardship, the Paris bureau became less of a traditional surveillance outfit and more of a laboratory for the dark arts of political provocation, targeted characterisation, and clandestine disinformation.

The exact intent behind the fabrication that emerged from this office remains one of the most enduring debates in the history of espionage. Because clandestine operations rarely leave a tidy paper trail, historians still clash over whether the text was directly ordered from the top down or assembled by rogue agents acting on instinct.

While the precise origin remains obscured, the strategic function of the document was unmistakable. By the mid-1890s, Rachkovsky was watching the Tsarist autocracy fracture under the weight of escalating industrial strikes, peasant unrest, and a rising tide of revolutionary Marxism. To a modern bureaucrat of subversion, crude domestic repression was no longer enough to save a decaying empire; the autocracy required an all-encompassing counter-narrative.

The text his bureau synthesised functioned as a grand theory of subversion. When it landed in Russia, it served a dual purpose: it was utilised by court reactionaries to convince the insecure Tsar Nicholas II that democratic reforms were a fatal trap, while simultaneously redirecting the grievances of the Russian populace away from the Tsar’s palaces and toward a traditional, easily identifiable scapegoat. In practice, the document operated as a piece of political engineering – a fabricated explanation for domestic instability that allowed the state to maintain its grip on power.

The French Blueprints

The circumstances for this experiment was uniquely provided by Rachkovsky’s surroundings in Paris. The Dreyfus Affair provided a contemporary template for the political subversion his bureau sought to master. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, had been falsely convicted of treason on the basis of a forged dossier manufactured by French military intelligence. While the case appeared to be a narrow military matter, it rapidly mutated into a totalising civil war that split the French Republic in two. In the hands of the reactionary Right, Dreyfus was transformed from an individual officer into the personification of an internal enemy, whose very existence in the military was framed as proof of a hidden, global disloyalty to the nation.

Operating from the Rue de Grenelle, the Okhrana bureau sat at the geographic heart of a crisis that demonstrated the power of a manufactured narrative. The French conservative establishment successfully deployed antisemitic hysteria to shield the army’s high command from accountability, effectively transforming a forensic case of military corruption into a crusade for national survival. The crisis provided a real-time demonstration that a fabricated narrative, if repeated with enough frequency in the press, could cripple a republic, proving that a manufactured crisis could insulate an absolute monarchy against the forces of reform.

Rachkovsky’s bureau maintained close ties with the editors of the most vitriolic anti-Dreyfusard journals, extracting from the street-level chaos of Paris the very machinery of psychological warfare intended for export back to the East. The Paris operation observed how a secular, political target could ignite the same ancient, visceral fury as the medieval blood libel. This served a dual domestic purpose: it would paralyse the Tsar’s impulse toward democratic reform by framing liberalisation as a hidden trap, while providing the security apparatus with a permanent, retroactive alibi for state failure. The resulting fabrication was not an outburst of medieval religious fury, but a clinical, state-sanctioned execution of political forgery designed to preserve an absolute monarchy at all costs.

Plagiary and Inversion

The physical manufacture of the text that would achieve global infamy as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion relied on a literal, deeply cynical architectural inversion. To understand how a text warning against tyranny became a handbook for global hatred, we have to look at the mechanics of a forgotten 1864 French political satire, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by a Parisian lawyer named Maurice Joly.

Joly had constructed his text as a covert, satirical assault on the authoritarian regime of Emperor Napoleon III. In his staging, the philosopher Montesquieu speaks for the ideals of liberalism, the rule of law, and constitutional democracy, while the Florentine statesman Machiavelli serves as the mouthpiece for raw power. Joly’s Machiavelli argues that a modern despot can easily dismantle a republic from within by subverting the free press, manipulating national debts, centralising financial control, and manufacturing public distractions. Joly’s work was a warning – a forensic analysis of how easily a contemporary dictator could pick apart the fabric of liberty while maintaining a democratic facade.

The fabricators inside the Tsarist security apparatus took this sophisticated defence of freedom and inverted its structure completely. By systematically lifting Machiavelli’s monologues almost word-for-word, the plagiarists simply removed the references to French politics and placed the authoritarian blueprint directly into the mouths of a mythical Jewish cabal.

The warnings Joly intended to issue against state despotism were transformed into a literal confession of a hidden global plot. A plot by the Jews. In this new, distorted context, Machiavelli’s observations on how an autocrat can control public opinion and engineer economic instability were presented to the world as the top-secret, verbatim minutes of an ancient conspiracy determined to bring Christian civilisation to its knees. The warning had become the weapon.

The Ideological Trap

This was no longer just a primitive project of religious defamation; it was a sophisticated piece of economic subversion designed to function as a tool of statecraft in the twentieth century. Under the stewardship of the Paris bureau, the fabricators shifted the target of hatred from the theological outsider of the Middle Ages to the symbolic architect of predatory modernity. They lifted Joly’s monologues regarding a despot’s manipulation of national debt, the engineering of stock market panics, and the subversion of the gold standard, and simply rebranded these tactics as “The Jewish Programme”.

This transition represented a lethal ideological pivot. By presenting a hidden cabal as the invisible puppet-masters of international finance, the Protocols offered a shortcut for those navigating the bewildering complexity of global capital. It generalised that poverty, hyperinflation, and economic instability were not the result of systemic flaws in the capitalist order, but the deliberate malice of a specific group of people.

Whether by design or coincidence, this functioned as an ideological trap to neutralise the radical Left. By framing a traditional scapegoat as the literal embodiment of predatory modernity, the Okhrana’s output served to fracture revolutionary movements. It redirected the anger of the dispossessed away from the state and toward a racialised caricature of the capitalist banker – offering a seductive, structural mechanism to preserve the Tsar’s throne.

The Reusable Fiction

When the momentum of Western condemnation over the Kishinev massacre triggered an unprecedented international backlash for the Tsarist regime – sparking protests in New York and condemnation in the British Parliament – the autocracy found a highly convenient ideological shield waiting in the wings. In August and September 1903, loose fragments of the text were rushed into print by right-wing provincial propagandists under the headline: The Jewish Programme for the Conquest of the World. By presenting the document as a captured plan for global subjugation, the autocracy sought to invert the narrative completely, signalling to a critical world that the butchery in Kishinev had not been a barbaric riot, but an act of domestic self-defence against an imminent existential threat.

Far from a static text, the forgery was a fluid, evolutionary document that mutated through numerous editions over subsequent decades, frequently changing its title, its structural arrangement, and its purported origins to match the shifting anxieties of the day. In its most successful and enduring repackaging, propagandists retroactively anchored the document to the First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. The text was newly presented not as a loose manifesto, but as the top-secret, verbatim minutes of a clandestine side meeting conducted by the “Elders” behind the backs of ordinary delegates. By 1905, the mystic writer Sergei Nilus had heavily padded these chapters and appended them to his apocalyptic book, The Great in the Small, reframing the political forgery as a theological prophecy of the Anti-Christ.

The enduring potency of the forgery lay in its elasticity. By stripped-down design, the text named no individual conspirators, identified no specific dates, and anchored itself to no single historical event. This deliberate emptiness transformed the text into a perfectly modular conspiracy theory – a blank canvas that could explain almost any subsequent political cataclysm.

Rachkovsky’s laboratory had synthesised something permanent. The reality of the text itself was incredibly tedious and practically unreadable – a repetitive bureaucratic slog that read like an endless set of minutes of a meeting. Yet, when it arrived in the West following the trauma of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the text achieved a sudden veneer of respectability; in 1920, the English translation was published in London by Eyre & Spottiswoode, the official printers to the British government and the Crown. Fuelled by this unearned aura of institutional authority, and supercharged by its subsequent industrial distribution by figures like the car manufacturer Henry Ford, the forgery mutated into a universal template for explaining the anxieties of the industrial age.

The exposure of the fraud by The Times of London in 1921 proved that the Protocols were a fake, but it could not prove that the conspiracy was a fiction to those who felt their world was collapsing around them. Rachkovsky’s ultimate export was a shape-shifting mind virus. It established a recurring pattern of scapegoating – a structural flaw transcending left-right politics that lies dormant during times of relative stability, only to be reactivated as an explanation for every subsequent crisis of the modern age. The theory behind the Protocols has become detached from the work itself. The Okhrana built a conspiracy theory that would outlive the Tsars and their empire, fuel the Hitler regime, and continue to haunt our political landscape today.

The arson attack on Kenton Synagogue last Saturday – a place I knew well in my youth – is now just another statistic, joining a week that also saw the Finchley Synagogue attacked on Wednesday and the Jewish Futures Building in Hendon targeted on Friday.

That is all in just one week. It comes less than two months after Jewish charity-owned ambulances were torched in Golders Green. Prior to this of course there was the murderous attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue in October last year on Yom Kippur which claimed the lives of two Jews. And those are just the headline grabbing attacks. Other incidents have not made big news and other attempted attacks have been thwarted by the authorities.

Everybody knows that antisemitism has made a resurgence in Britain. That anti-Jewish racism is worse now than it ever has been in most people’s living memory. Well not quite everybody. Not the anti-racism experts. I am not the first and certainly won’t be the last to point out that as a rule progressives, anti-racists, left-wingers – whatever label fits – have little useful to say on the matter. That is if they have anything to say at all.

Why do anti-racists find combatting antisemitism so difficult?

It will surprise few that the answer lies in decades of “anti-Zionism” in the anti-racist movement. “Anti-Zionism” is in inverted commas because it is an ideology in itself and has nothing to do with opposition to actually existing Zionism.

I can recall several occasions when the issue caused rifts in the anti-racist movement and on each occasion it played out similarly.

Firstly, Jewish anti-racists/anti-fascists and their allies were accused of failing to grasp contemporary racism. Secondly, attempts were made to sideline them with new anti-racist initiatives from which they were excluded or driven out. Thirdly, a whispering campaign was conducted claiming the Jewish anti-racists were “Zionists.”

It is precisely because of this historic behaviour that the anti-racist left is so incapable of combatting antisemitism.

The Cable Street Formulation

It would take a real contortionist to deny or minimise that Jews experience racial hatred. Yet at the heart of the anti-racist movement are individuals whose skills in that department are circus-level. Of course they profess to oppose all forms of racism, including antisemitism.

There are anti-racists who genuinely believe that Jews are white and privileged and therefore don’t experience racism. How unaware would you have to be of the historic joint fight of Black and Jewish people against racism and antisemitism? How ignorant would you have to be of what Jews are? Did the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa completely pass them by?

I think there is a notion among some progressives that antisemitism was something that was successfully fought and defeated in the 1930s and 1940s and that any mention of it today has only one purpose, to deflect attention from criticism of Israel. The clincher to prove how well they understand the issue is to say “My Mother/Father/Grandparents were at the Battle of Cable Street” in reference to the historic defeat of the fascists in East London in 1936. I call it the Cable Street Formulation.

Fighting antisemitism

Perhaps Britain’s Trotskyists – for Trotskyists is invariably what they are – have a better understanding of racism than anyone else and deserve to decide anti-racist policy for the movement. They obviously think so, even if I don’t. That isn’t the point though.

The Jewish anti-racists who monitor antisemitism and physically protect their community have a sharper grasp of the threat than the movement at large. In fact, what many activists perceive about antisemitism is inversely proportional to their actual insight. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias where theoretical comfort masquerades as clarity. By stubbornly applying one-size-fits-all frameworks that ignore the unique, conspiratorial nature of antisemitism, the movement is hitting a structural wall of its own making.

When an ideological project prioritises internal consensus over reality, it ceases to be a tool for progress and descends into an intellectual cul-de-sac. Refusing to understand the specific mechanics of the threat, in favour of a pre-approved, abstract template, is a retreat from the rigour any serious movement requires.

If the goal is to confront reaction, the movement must first confront its own intellectual paralysis. Without the humility to learn from those on the front lines, it will continue to mistake its own narrow, theoretical comfort for an objective understanding of the world, leaving it unable to meaningfully challenge the forces it claims to stand against.

Jews deserve better solidarity than this.

In my previous two articles in this series for Leaden Skies, I examined the legacy of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini’s post-war work with Nazis and his networks in Egypt and elsewhere. In this third instalment, I look at the ideological framework that set the precedent to allow his movement to be rebranded as “resistance.” By tracing the Comintern’s “Third Period” script of 1929, we see how the organisation first provided an alibi for the Mufti’s violence — and why their 1939 reversal, which branded him an “agent of German fascism,” is a warning many on the left ignore.

When the massacre and hostage taking of Israelis (and others) was carried out by Hamas and their Islamist allies on October 7 2023, the immediate response from most socialists and trade unionists was one of horror at the antisemitic crimes committed that day.

Then, as the Hamas and clerical-fascist Iranian propaganda machines got into gear, within days the narrative shifted, before Israel had responded in the way it did. Sentimentality about the killing of some 1,200 people paled into insignificance compared to the crimes of the Israeli occupation.

To many, this appeared to be a sudden and inexplicable collapse of left-wing logic — a descent into a worldview that was unthinkable before.

Except it wasn’t new.

We had seen this exact script play out, almost to the letter, nearly 100 years earlier.

The precedent: The Hebron Massacre

In August 1929 a mob of Hebron’s local residents, joined by people from outside the area tooled up with axes, clubs and knives, engaged in a house-to-house systematic slaughter of the city’s Jews. Medical records and survivor testimonies paint a harrowing picture of mutilation, torture, and sexual violence. Elderly rabbis, women, and infants were amongst the 67 Jews who died.

While the tragedy unfolded in Hebron, its spark was nearly 20 miles north at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. A year of escalating disputes over Jewish prayer rights at the holy site had been weaponised by the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spread inflammatory rumours that the Al-Aqsa Mosque was under imminent threat. This fear acted as the catalyst for nationwide unrest.

Not everyone fell for the Mufti’s propaganda. Some 435 Jews survived the onslaught, shielded by 28 local Arab families who defended their neighbours against the mob.

The immediate aftermath

The bloodbath in Hebron was just the worst part of a week of violence across the country that left 133 Jews dead and 116 Arabs killed, the latter mostly by British police fire.

The Hebron massacre remains the definitive fracture in the history of the British Mandate — a moment when the abstract friction of Jerusalem’s politics ignited a local slaughter. In a matter of days an at least 800-year Jewish presence in one of the most significant urban centres in British Mandate Palestine was ended. The authorities moved the entire Jewish community out in the aftermath.

By the time the survivors were evacuated to Jerusalem, the message was clear for Palestine’s Jews. This was a community facing serious violence. The militarisation of the underground Zionist self-defence force the Haganah — that protected the Jewish communities of what was known as the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish communities in Palestine) — had become an existential necessity. The Mufti had inadvertently initiated the arming of the victorious organisation that became the basis of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) upon the state’s establishment in May 1948.

There is no doubt that Arab grievances over land and the future were real, but it took a special kind of malice to direct that anger at the hapless innocent Jews of Hebron.

The Communist Line(s): Fascist Zionists

One outcome was to have long-lasting ramifications. Communists in Palestine and abroad reacted with horror to the events, calling them what it was: a pogrom carried out by reactionaries. They had characterised attacks on the Jewish community the previous year in the same way and remained certain this was the correct analysis. The small communist party saw the defence of Jews as its duty, met with leaders of the Haganah in Jerusalem and put its small arms cache at their disposal.

Then the Comintern got the line out. Moscow had entered the “Third Period” — a new sectarian ultra-left phase where it believed capitalism was about to collapse and demanded a “class against class” offensive. In this new world, it wasn’t a pogrom at all but the revolution of the Arab people against the imperialists and exploiters. Now anyone believed to be standing in the way of the revolution, including other socialists, was characterised as a fascist. In Britain that meant the Labour Party; in Palestine, Zionists.

The first official communication by a Comintern controlled organisation came from the League against Imperialism and Colonialism in September. It claimed the fight “was between the Arab inhabitants, and the immigrant Zionist population artificially imported.” Never mind the fact that the Jews of Hebron — where the worst of the violence happened — were not immigrant Zionists, but a religious community that had predated the Mandate by centuries.

Then on 1 October 1929, the official organ of the Communist International made the line even clearer:

“We have before us not simple ‘riots,’ not a pogrom, but a fairly serious movement of the Arab masses against imperialism.”

The volte face

Communist opposition to Zionism at this point was very different to the antisemitic conspiratorial and Nazi-inflected versions that came later and was based on the view that Zionism diverted Jewish workers away from the class struggle and also that Zionism — in the light of the Balfour Declaration — served the interests of British imperialism.

Crucially, prior to the new line, communists opposed the sort of Pan-Islamism that was to whip up the anti-Jewish violence in Hebron and elsewhere. In 1920 Lenin argued in his Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions:

“for the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.”

That Lenin was talking about the likes of Haj Amin al-Husseini — who became Grand Mufti the following year — is beyond doubt. The al-Husseinis were one of the “Ayan” — the elite class of wealthy Arab land-owning families who had dominated political and religious offices of the region for centuries under the Ottoman Empire.

The Shaw Commission: Legal Realpolitik

Following the 1929 violence, Britain’s Shaw Commission inquiry sought to determine if Zionist “provocations” had sparked the unrest. The Jewish Chronicle of December 6, 1929, reported that Haj Amin al-Husseini, was granted the special privilege reserved for religious leaders of giving evidence in camera at his home. His counsel cited the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in his defence.

It was further revealed that Arab press images of “Zionist flags” over Jerusalem’s holy sites were also actually forgeries, repurposed from Jewish New Year cards. Despite this evidence of premeditated incitement, the British performed an exercise in realpolitik. They largely exonerated the Mufti, characterising the slaughter as a “spontaneous” reaction to Zionist ambitions. The resulting Passfield White Paper sought to pacify the perpetrators by strictly restricting Jewish immigration although the final policy was heavily watered down under political pressure.

The Popular Front and the Great Revolt

By 1934, the Third Period line had collapsed under the weight of its own failure. In Germany, the communist branding of Social Democrats as “Social Fascists” had been a disaster; combined with the Social Democrats' own deep-seated distrust and rigid legalism, this lack of unity helped the Nazis to seize power. Consequently, the Comintern pivoted to the “Popular Front”— a strategy of making alliances with any democratic force standing against Hitler and Mussolini. It was this anti-fascist line that helped make communism a popular force in the 1930s and 1940s and famously helped build the International Brigades in Spain and defend the East End of London’s Jewish community.

Meanwhile, in Palestine, the ground was shifting toward a more militant Jihad. Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian-born cleric, built a clandestine network of fighters in Haifa. Unlike the Mufti’s political manoeuvring, al-Qassam sought an apocalyptic struggle against the British and Zionists. Following his death in a shootout with British police in 1935, his followers sparked the Great Arab Revolt (1936-1939) with the Grand Mufti opportunistically taking the helm.

This sustained campaign of strikes and rebellion eventually forced a strategic British retreat: the 1939 White Paper. This time the policy effectively ended the promise of a Jewish National Home by strictly limiting immigration — just as the systematic persecution of European Jewry was reaching a point of no return.

Comintern declares The Mufti an Agent of Fascism

The Arab revolt in the 1930s was a much more serious challenge to British rule than anything that had come before, but now the Comintern viewed it as reactionary. By 1939, it was no longer possible for the Comintern to ignore the reality that the Mufti’s movement was an auxiliary of the Axis. Their reversal was an admission that the “anti-imperialism” they had championed in 1929 had become a vehicle for Nazi expansionism in the Middle East. The January 1939 edition of the Communist International monthly went into chapter and verse how Nazi propagandists were active throughout the Arab world and then declared:

“The responsibility for the present bloodshed in Palestine also falls upon those reactionary elements among the Arabs who constantly betray the interests of their own country. At the head of the insurrection now stands the Mussulman priesthood in Palestine — the Mufti Ali [sic] Hussein — a bought agent of German fascism, whom the fascists claim to be a fighter for the interests of the Arab people.

Ali Hussein and his crew are not only no representatives but they are wreckers and betrayers of the real national movement for the independence of the Arab people, of the just cause of the Arab masses. Mufti Ali Hussein and his clique do not shrink from organizing plots and provocation against the real revolutionary leaders of the Arab people. With such corrupt methods and with such provocation they mask themselves before the Arab people. These traitors are to the forefront in inciting national dissension between Arabs and Jews. They do not confine their agitation to Palestine but carry it on in all Arab countries.”

The Modern Echo of a Centenary Failure

The most enduring legacy of this era is the template the Comintern established in 1929: the idea that targeted anti-Jewish violence can be intellectually rehabilitated if it is framed as anti-imperialism. When the Comintern declared that the Hebron massacre was not a pogrom but a “movement of the Arab masses,” they provided an ideological alibi for slaughter that has been dusted off for the twenty-first century. This same logic echoes in modern anti-Zionist discourse whenever the targeting of Jewish civilians is excused as a necessary component of resistance against a colonial power. By categorising the victims as artificial or imported agents of empire — just as the Comintern did to the ancient Jewish community of Hebron — modern rhetoric denies their status as civilians.

There is a grim irony in the fact that the perpetrators of the October 7th attacks — the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades — carry the name of the very cleric whose movement the Comintern eventually dismissed as reactionary and fascist-aligned in 1939. Ultimately, the Comintern itself recognised its error, branding the Mufti an “agent of Fascism” as his alliance with the Axis powers became undeniable. He spent the war in Berlin as a guest of the Third Reich, meeting with Hitler and broadcasting Nazi propaganda to the Arab world.

Yet, much of today’s ultra-left remains stuck in the Third Period of 1929, retreating into an invented tradition whose provenance they are blissfully unaware of, repeating an analysis that ignores reality. If the left is to be a genuine and serious progressive force, it has to reject the notion that a massacre can be revolutionary and state that in print rather than at very best say nothing.

The left needs to get back to basics: to a time when it understood that a pogrom — the slaughter of Jews — is never a weapon of progress, never justifiable, but an enemy act carried out by the foot soldiers of reaction and the agents of fascism.

The quote from the League against Imperialism and Colonialism is taken from Musa Buderi’s book, The Palestine Communist Party 1919-1948, Haymarket Books.

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In 1955, a wanted wartime collaborator with Nazi Germany appeared at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Haj Amin al-Husseini arrived clinging to the “Grand Mufti” title — a British invention of the 1920s designed to reward his family’s cooperation with the Mandate. Though he had been a fugitive since fleeing arrest in 1937 after the escalation of the Arab Revolt, he never relinquished the designation.

The conference brought together 29 newly independent nations representing over half the world’s population. It was a summit aimed at promoting Afro-Asian cooperation and opposing all forms of imperialism. Clad in his signature black robes and white-wrapped tarboosh, al-Husseini leveraged this anti-colonial spirit to recast his sectarian grievances as a crusade for national liberation.

By holding court with figures like China’s Zhou Enlai, he began weaving Nazi-honed propaganda into the secular language of the post-colonial world. He was there to ensure that his personal cause was not left behind, but was instead part of the foundational rhetoric of a new global order.

Lobbying against Israel

The Mufti’s rebranding wasn’t his only successful manoeuvre at Bandung. He helped secure a major diplomatic coup before the conference even began by successfully lobbying for the omission of Israel from the guest list. While the conference organisers talked of the inalienable right of all nations to self-determination and welcomed other fledgling Asian states — from communist North Vietnam to the fragile monarchy of Laos — Israel was shut out. It was the only new Asian nation to be denied an invitation on the grounds of inherent illegitimacy.

His work wasn’t carried out alone. From his base in Cairo, he had partnered with unrepentant Nazis to professionalise his message. Chief among them was Johann von Leers (Omar Amin), a former Goebbels protégé turned Egyptian advisor, along with other high-ranking fugitives like Leopold Gleim (the former Gestapo chief in Poland now known as Ali al-Nahar) and Louis Heiden, who after adopting the name Louis al-Haj, oversaw the translation of Mein Kampf into Arabic. They were all salaried employees of the Egyptian Ministry of National Guidance.

Together, they repackaged Nazi propaganda into the progressive vocabulary of the Third World. By stripping away theological arguments in favour of framing Israel as a “biological fraud” and a “colonialist dagger,” the Cairo Nazis provided the Mufti with a bilingual strategy: he could weaponise Islamic solidarity for his Arab allies while offering secular leaders like India’s Nehru and China’s Zhou Enlai an anti-imperialist pretext for the Jewish state’s total erasure from the Asian-African family.

The Mufti did not act in a vacuum; he was the ideological edge of a broader Arab League ultimatum. Even if he hadn’t been involved there were countries that wanted to sideline Israel for their own reasons and would have likely had their way. For Egypt and Pakistan, excluding Israel was a matter of regional power-play; for Indonesia, it was a prerequisite for hosting a unified Islamic bloc.

But for the Mufti, it was the final, global application of a campaign he had been waging since the 1920s. The religious leader now had an additional Nazified weapon in his arsenal which provided the secular reasoning that allowed the five sponsoring nations to transform a regional boycott into a foundational principle of the Third World.

The Strategy of Exclusion

Before the invitations were even sent, the Mufti successfully engineered an all-or-nothing ultimatum. As documented in the minutes of the 1954 Bogor preparatory meeting, he worked through the Arab League to make it clear to the five sponsoring nations (India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Indonesia) that if Israel were invited, the entire Arab bloc would boycott the conference.

This put leaders like Nehru and Burma’s U Nu (who were in favour of inviting Israel) in an impossible position: they could have an Asian only conference that was missing the entire Middle East, or they could have a successful conference that excluded one small state. The Mufti ensured the price of including Israel was too high to pay.

The list of the uninvited at the Bandung Conference exposed a precarious balance between anti-colonial idealism and Cold War pragmatism. While Israel was excluded as an ideological outlier, other absences were strategic: North and South Korea, along with Taiwan.

The exclusion of the Soviet Central Asian republics served a dual purpose: it prevented the summit from being used as a platform by Moscow, while reflecting a deeper suspicion of the Kremlin’s domestic treatment of Muslims in particular. By barring these territories, the sponsors effectively categorised Soviet rule as a form of the very imperialism they had gathered to dismantle — a sentiment the Mufti exploited to frame his own cause as the only authentic path for the Middle East.

While South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were sidelined as Western “settler” outposts, Israel’s exclusion was the true anomaly: a newly independent Asian state denied its regional identity by a collective, ideological vote. At Bandung, national legitimacy was no longer defined by geography or statehood, but by a new consensus — one the Mufti helped create — where a nation could be diplomatically erased before even reaching the podium.

Shifting the Narrative: From Faith to Decolonisation

In the 1920s, the Mufti had portrayed Zionism as a religious problem and a threat to the mosques and religious sites in the Holy Land. Long before he met Hitler he had taken on the narrative of murderous modern antisemitism. When he helped incite the violence in 1929 that led to the massacre of 67 Jews of the long-standing (non-Zionist) Jewish community of Hebron his defence cited the Tsarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the ensuing British commission of inquiry. The massacre ended centuries of Jewish presence in the city.

Al-Husseini spent his time behind the scenes lobbying with anti-Israel propaganda. His team flooded the conference hotels with thousands of professionally produced pamphlets. These publications, crafted in Cairo with the help of his Nazi advisors, used maps and “scientific” arguments to brand Israel as an alien, colonial being — a narrative that was about to go global.

At Bandung he successfully framed Zionism as a regional political problem. He moved the argument from being about faith to arguing that the new state should not exist because it was a violation of the principles of the UN and decolonisation. Never mind that he and the other Arab countries he worked with rejected the UN partition in the first place.

The Paper Leader and the Corridors of Bandung

While Israel was excluded, Al-Husseini attended the Bandung Conference as a member of the Yemen delegation to bypass his lack of official statehood. Yemen was one of the few states where his traditional religious authority still outweighed his status as a diplomatic liability.

Al-Husseini was a leader in exile, presiding over an “All-Palestine Government” that existed only on paper in Cairo. His power in the region had been systematically dismantled, and not by Israel but his Arab brothers. His rival, King Hussein of Jordan, had annexed the West Bank and appointed his own Mufti in Jerusalem, effectively stripping al-Husseini of his religious jurisdiction.

Even his Egyptian patrons held him on a short leash. Years earlier, the Egyptian military had forcibly removed him from his base in Gaza, fearing his presence would trigger a premature war with Israel. He was, in essence, a stateless fugitive being used as a pawn in a regional powerplay. For Nasser’s Egypt, the Mufti was a “phantom” to be unleashed against the Jordanians — a way to challenge King Hussein’s claim to Palestine without committing a single Egyptian soldier. Bandung was one great final performance for a leader without a territory who was trying to reshape global opinion.

Despite his lack of a formal state, al-Husseini was one of the media’s most sought-after delegates, trailing a wake of international journalists who were fascinated by the sight of a wanted wartime collaborator reinvented as a diplomat. The international press captured him in many photos with secular giants who were publicly preaching a new, moral world order.

It was a pivotal moment where his Nazi-era rhetoric began to merge seamlessly with the language of global anti-imperialism. The man who had once reviewed SS troops in Bosnia was now being embraced as a hero of the Third World, standing alongside leaders like Nehru and Nasser.

The Genesis of Zionology

Communism and Zionism had a long history of conflict, predating the founding of their respective states. However, the communist opposition was to Jewish nationalism per se and included both the Zionists and the General Jewish Labour Bund, the latter having initially made greater inroads into the Jewish working class.

The Kremlin’s alternative was Birobidzhan — the Jewish Autonomous Region — established in 1928 on the Chinese border, some 20 years before Israel was founded. It was a state-sanctioned experiment in secular Yiddish culture designed to divert Jewish national feeling away from Palestine and into the Soviet project. This opposition to independent Jewish nationalism was eventually systematised into the machinery of state security.

By the late 1940s, with Zionism now the ascendant form of Jewish nationalism, antisemitism had surfaced — often murderously — through the “Anti-Cosmopolitan” purges and show trials in Moscow and the 1952 Slánský trial in Prague. They were the proving ground where the Soviet state first learned to mask ancient prejudices under the guise of protecting the revolution from Zionism.

So, while the Mufti and friends provided the initial branding in 1955, the Soviet Union was no stranger to antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism and effectively built a propaganda factory for it a decade later. It had been amongst the first to support the creation of Israel in 1948, recognising the material reality of post-Holocaust Europe and as a blow against British imperialism, but it returned to its prewar anti-Zionism — now infused with antisemitism — as if it had never happened.

Following the 1967 Six-Day War, the Kremlin moved beyond mere rhetoric, institutionalising “Zionology” as a formal branch of Marxist-Leninist state science. Through the Academy of Sciences and the Central Committee’s propaganda organs, the Soviet state established dedicated research groups to scientifically frame Zionism as a form of racism.

This was an ideological merger of convenience: the Kremlin needed to explain the military defeat of its Arab allies by depicting Israel as a global, conspiratorial force rather than a small regional power. It was this Soviet-led “science” that transformed the Mufti’s “colonialist dagger” into a sophisticated Cold War weapon, marketed to the Third World.

While Zionology was a Soviet creation, it found its most effective tactical partners in East Germany (GDR) and the Arab League. Working in close coordination, East Berlin and the various Anti-Israel Departments of the Arab states provided the “anti-fascist” repackaging that allowed these Soviet doctrines to enter the mainstream.

The Cold War’s Dirty Game

The GDR was a country that was genuinely founded and led by anti-fascist communist survivors of concentration camps like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. These leaders possessed a unique moral legitimacy. They converted this personal history into a diplomatic asset, which shielded a narrative crafted by salaried ex-Nazis in Cairo and ensured the socialist bloc’s influence in the emergent Third World.

With clinical pragmatism, the anti-fascist state used its apparatus to simultaneously launch effective campaigns exposing former Nazis in West Germany, while repurposing Nazi-era tropes to serve the Arab League’s information war. This partnership allowed for the ultimate ideological repackaging — translating 1920s religious and racial grievances into the modern, secular language of anti-imperialism.

As shocking as this is, it has to be understood in the context of the Cold War, the apocalyptic climate of fear of mutual destruction, and the astonishingly dirty game that it produced.

They were not alone.

The United States space programme that put a man on the moon was directed by Kurt Debus, a former SS officer and ardent Nazi who had developed the V-2 rocket using slave labour at Peenemünde. Even Israel — the Jewish State — recruited one of the most notorious ex-Nazis, Otto Skorzeny, to sabotage Egypt’s missile programme. These were just the big names among many more. In this light, the GDR working with useful Nazis was not the anomaly, the anomaly was that the collaboration involved promoting their antisemitism.

The Legacy of the Performance

The Mufti’s achievement at Bandung was the successful pitch of a lobbyist who knew his audience and his patrons rather than the triumph of a statesman. By nesting his 1920s sectarianism within the 1950s language of anti-colonialism, he provided the ideological architecture that larger powers — the Soviet Union, the GDR, and the Arab League — found useful for their international work.

The immediate outcome of Bandung was a seismic shift in global power. Beyond fostering economic and cultural cooperation, the conference established a permanent bloc of newly independent nations — a collective force capable of bypassing old colonial centres.

However, for the Middle East, the consequence was more specific: the final communiqué formally supported “the rights of the Arab people of Palestine.” For the first time, a regional territorial dispute was adopted as a core concern of this emergent international axis, transforming it into a non-negotiable litmus test for anti-imperialist solidarity.

The exclusion of Israel persisted because it served the interests of the major players. The language crafted in those corridors by a stateless fugitive and the state departments of his patrons — later refined and industrialised in the Soviet Union —became the blueprint for the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which formally branded Zionism as a form of racism.

Resolution 3379 passed with 72 votes in favour, 35 against, and 32 abstentions. Presiding over the session was UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim (left on platform) — a man whose wartime service as an intelligence officer in a Nazi Wehrmacht unit involved in Balkan atrocities would not be exposed for another decade.

Haj Amin al-Husseini died in Beirut in 1974, a “phantom” who had long been eclipsed by the state-sponsored movements he helped frame. He died just a year before the narrative he helped professionalise reached its zenith at the UN, providing the initial branding for a movement that was eventually adopted, refined, and enforced by sovereign states.

While he ended his life as a man without a country, his most enduring legacy was not in territory won, but in the language he left behind — a narrative that continues to haunt lecture rooms, trade unions, and legislative chambers long after the man himself has turned to dust.

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In 1957, Ludwig Pankraz Zind was a maths teacher in Offenburg, West Germany. He was also a relic of the Old Guard — a former SA Storm Trooper and Wehrmacht captain who still wore a Hitler-style toothbrush moustache, a duelling scar on his cheek, and what a journalist described as a ‘ramrod-erect’ posture.

One evening he was drinking at midnight in a local bar when a stranger walked in. Full of drink and bonhomie he invited the man over and for a couple of hours over champagne and schnapps they got on famously.

The uninhibited rant

Then at 2.00 am things took a dark turn when the well lubricated and uninhibited Zind began a diatribe on his hatred of Jews. The stranger, Kurt Lieser, let him talk for a bit before finally dropping the hammer:

“I ought to tell you that I spent the war in a concentration camp, and am Jewish.”

Zind didn’t flinch. He spat back the line that would eventually spark a national scandal, make international news, and force him out of the country:

“That means they forgot to gas you too? The Nazis did not gas enough Jews.”

As fellow drinkers stepped in to prevent a fight, Zind shouted his final verdict on the post-Hitler world:

“And Israel — Israel should be removed like a carbuncle!”

A National Crisis

Lieser appealed to the state government to take action, but nothing happened. As he pushed for justice, officials tried to brush the incident away, attempting to broker a quiet handshake between the survivor and the former Nazi Brownshirt. But instead of apologising, a now sober Zind snapped:

“I would rather clean the streets than crawl to a Jew.”

The stalemate ended when Der Spiegel broke the story, sparking a national crisis relating to how a teacher in “de-nazified” West Germany could be allowed to hold these views. 100,000 members of the Teachers’ Association demanded a trial, and parliament was forced to investigate reports that Zind had been airing these views in his classroom for years.

When the case hit the courtroom in 1958, there was no remorse from the dock. Zind informed the court with cold arrogance that if West Germany had no use for him, a teaching post already awaited him in Cairo.

Presiding Judge Johannes Eckert declared:

“Zind’s words rip open the old, barely healed wounds of the German people. What thousands have tried to repair, one man with such words can destroy.”

Nevertheless, the gallery sided with the teacher. As Zind was sentenced to a year in prison, women in the courtroom wept and men queued up to shake his hand.

Zind had no intention of serving time in a West German cell. He obtained a false passport under the name “Helmut Vollmer” and hit the ratlines. When his ship docked in Alexandria, the manifest revealed the company he kept: sharing the deck was the wife of Dr Hans Eisele, a man who had carried out horrific medical experiments on camp inmates. Mrs Eisele was fleeing to join her husband in their new sanctuary.

The Teacher, the Doctor and the Propagandist

Once in Cairo, Zind didn’t just find a teaching job; he found a headquarters. Declassified CIA files confirm that Zind moved directly into the home of Johann von Leers at House 21, Rue 83, in the suburb of Maadi.

The villa was a rogue’s gallery of the Third Reich. Zind lived in the same house as Dr Hans Eisele, the man who had performed medical atrocities on the very people Zind wished had been gassed and whose wife Zind had travelled with. Under the roof of Von Leers — Goebbels’ most trusted ideologue — the schoolteacher, the propagandist, and the concentration camp doctor formed an unusual domestic unit.

Replacing the British Masters

Zind’s arrival came when there was a state-driven vacuum of teachers in the Egyptian classroom. In the wake of the Suez Crisis, Nasser had purged the “imperialist” British teachers from the country’s schools, including the elite Victoria College, known as the “Eton of the Middle East.” With the English masters expelled, the school was renamed El Nasr, and the regime looked for European teachers who shared their ideological bent.

Zind didn’t have to apologise for his past. He stepped into the classrooms of El Nasr, once occupied by Englishmen, and began teaching maths to the Egyptian elite. The man deemed legally unfit to influence the youth of West Germany was now a state-sanctioned educator, protected by the regime he had come to serve.

Spotted by Israelis: The SS Theodor Herzl

The fugitive life nearly came to an end in 1960 through a twist of fate. Zind grew restless in Cairo and sought a more lucrative post as a professor of geology at the University of Tripoli, where the post-independence monarchy was hiring European professionals to build its education system. Travelling under the name he had initially used to escape justice in Germany, “Helmut Vollmer,” Zind was spotted near the docks in Naples while waiting for a ship to Tripoli.

Despite the fake name, he had refused to change his appearance; his “ramrod” posture and toothbrush moustache were unmistakable from the international press coverage of his case. He was recognised by crew members of the S.S. Theodor Herzl, an Israeli passenger ship docked nearby. The group of sailors who trailed and confronted him was led by Zvi Trebish, a veteran of the Israeli Merchant Marine who had served as the personal waiter to David Ben-Gurion, the founding father and first Prime Minister of Israel. They were from the country Zind hated so much. The sailors — including survivors of the very camps Zind wished more had been gassed in — didn’t just watch him; they engaged him in conversation to be sure. After confirming his identity, they handed him over to the Italian police and then cabled Haifa with the words:

“we captured the Nazi criminal.”

The Full Circle

Though arrested, Zind’s luck held. An Italian court refused to extradite him, claiming his “crime” was political. He successfully made it to Libya, where he spent most of the 1960s teaching, protected by a regime that valued his German technical expertise over his criminal Jew hatred.

In 1970, after twelve years on the run, a 64-year-old Zind finally returned to West Germany. He was arrested at the airport and forced to serve the prison sentence he had spent over a decade evading. He died in 1973 in Offenburg — the same town where his original outburst had first set the scandal in motion.

This story is a companion piece to my look at the man who hosted Zind and aided other fugitives in Egypt. If you missed the first part of this series, you can read it here: 👉 The Cairo Connection: Johann von Leers and the Rebirth of Nazi Propaganda

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Nazis who had fled Germany after the war are “the hardest people to find or interview” claimed the Toronto Star journalist William Stevenson. He had spent years in pursuit of Nazis and in August 1956 was in Cairo on the trail of Johann von Leers, one of the Nazis chief propagandists.

When Stevenson found von Leers, working in an Egyptian government office, it was a coup which he claimed was made possible by an inside tip off from a disgruntled employee but in reality likely came from a hostile intelligence service. Von Leers, who had been a key figure in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, visibly perspired in his office situated next to the office of the propaganda chief in charge of producing anti-Israel material, as he was questioned about his work.

While they were talking another member of staff brought in a large file with documents on the Suez Canal. These were turbulent times in the region, in June 1956 Gamal Abdul Nasser had solidified power and become President. One of his first acts was to nationalise the Suez Canal, an act that had huge international ramifications. The interview with Stevenson was taking place just a month afterwards.

Von Leers was a propagandist in the pay of Nasser. The man who had spent the years of Nazi rule producing anti-Jewish tracts for Hitler soon turned to his favourite subject, and the reason that he was in Nasser’s employ: “Israel is abnormal… it must go,” he said.

For his pains, Stevenson was quickly expelled from the country.

The Nazi Party Propagandist

It had been a long road from Berlin to Cairo. A fanatical “Old Guard” Nazi, von Leers joined the party in 1929 and quickly became one of Joseph Goebbels’ most trusted ideologues. In the early days of the movement, he was a street-level firebrand, but his intellectual pedigree soon moved him into the inner sanctum of the Propaganda Ministry. There, he specialised in mobilising the German masses by synthesising academic theory with populist antisemitism.

Beyond his administrative role, von Leers was a Professor of History at the University of Jena, where he used the prestige of academia to justify racial hierarchy and the “scientific” necessity of German expansion. He held the rank of Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS and was a significant contributor to Der Angriff, the party’s Berlin mouthpiece. His output was prolific; he wrote dozens of publications and even authored children’s books, ensuring that the youngest Germans were indoctrinated into the Nazi worldview.

Von Leers was fluent in Dutch, Japanese, English, and Spanish — a toolkit that would later facilitate his global escape and his post-war utility to foreign powers. Ultimately, his work served as the intellectual machinery of the Holocaust, providing the pseudo-legal and historical justifications required to transform state-sponsored persecution into a “moral” crusade for the Reich.

The Nazi Ratlines from Germany to Argentina and Egypt

Johann von Leers fled Germany in 1945 following the collapse of the Nazi regime. After spending several years in hiding in Germany and briefly moving through Italy, he utilised the notorious “ratline” escape networks to reach Argentina in 1950. During his time in Buenos Aires, he edited the German-language Nazi publication Der Weg and lived under the protection of Juan Perón’s government. Von Leers was the most prolific contributor to Der Weg, which was the ideological “bible” for the Nazi diaspora.

Von Leers saw nearby Uruguay as the most important South American target for propaganda because its stable democracy and powerful trade unions represented fertile ground. Under the pseudonym E.S. de los Reyes his antisemitic pamphlet The Power Behind the President (or El Poder detrás del Presidente) first began appearing at Montevideo’s union meetings and other political gatherings in 1954.

Because von Leers was a high-profile ex-Nazi, his movements were tracked. The CIA Name File on Johannes von Leers (declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act) states that in 1954–1955, von Leers was hired by General Hasan Fahmy Ismail, the military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy in Argentina to conduct an anti-Jewish campaign in the region.

The attaché reported to Cairo that von Leers had successfully created nationalist (antisemitic) propaganda that could “turn” left-leaning workers away from both Western and local Communist Party influence.

Egyptian Refuge

Von Leers also maintained contact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Haj Amin al-Husseini was by then based in Cairo and the two shared a history dating back to the Third Reich, when they collaborated on Arabic-language broadcasts from Berlin. During the war, von Leers had helped tailor Nazi racial ideology into a form that resonated with the Mufti’s religious and nationalist rhetoric.

He had become favourably fascinated by Islam during the 1940s and in December 1942, von Leers published an essay titled “Judaism and Islam as Opposites” (Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze) in the antisemitic journal Die Judenfrage. The article argued that Islam was the antithesis of Judaism.

Haj Amin al-Husseini was a wanted war criminal who avoided prosecution when the British, fearing a pan-Islamic uprising if they hung him like fellow broadcaster and Quisling Lord Haw Haw, and the French, seeking regional influence, allowed him to “escape” house arrest in 1946. By the time he reached asylum in Cairo, he had successfully rebranded himself from a Nazi collaborator into a leading figure in the newly emerging anti-colonial movement.

Von Leers’ Egyptian connection proved crucial following the 1955 military coup in Argentina that ousted Perón. To avoid potential extradition, von Leers relocated to Egypt, where he was welcomed by the Nasser administration and guided through a formal conversion to Islam by the Mufti himself. Adopting the name Omar Amin, von Leers chose his new middle name as a direct tribute to his patron.

The Architect of the New Protocols

In Cairo, von Leers transformed into the intellectual engine of Nasser’s anti-Western psychological warfare, operating out of the Egyptian Ministry of National Guidance as a “special advisor.” His most significant contribution was his reimagining of the Tsarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he repurposed not as a religious conspiracy, but as a political blueprint for “Zionist-Imperialist” world domination by swapping the term “Jews” with “Zionists”.

He became the German representative of the Arab League and this rebranding was crucial for the organisation’s global strategy, as it allowed the League to disseminate classic Nazi tropes under the guise of anti-colonialist liberation. By churning out a massive volume of pamphlets, radio scripts, and “scholarly” articles that linked the US and Israeli governments to a Jewish global cabal, von Leers successfully laundered 1930s German propaganda into the mainstream political discourse of the Middle East, providing the ideological foundation for the state-sponsored antisemitism that defined the region for decades.

The postwar “ODESSA” network

In addition to his propaganda activities von Leers was a key figure in the network of former SS men across the world. The CIA files and fiction and films call the “organisation” he was involved in “ODESSA” (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) although in reality there was no organisation by that name. There was a network for both mutual aid and to keep the Hitlerite flame alive by contact with not only old Nazis but a new generation of “neo-nazis”.

While von Leers was repackaging Nazi ideology into post-war anti-colonial theory, others from the “Old Guard” were seeking sanctuary in Cairo to escape justice for more visceral crimes. Among the most notorious was Hans Eisele, a former SS-Hauptsturmführer and camp doctor at Buchenwald. Eisele had been sentenced to death during the Dachau trials for his participation in horrific medical experiments and the summary execution of prisoners. However, through a series of legal wranglings and the shifting political winds of the early Cold War, he was released from prison in 1952. By 1958, facing a new indictment for the murder of inmates, Eisele used the same ratline infrastructure that had serviced von Leers, fleeing Europe just ahead of an arrest warrant to find a new home in Egypt.

Upon his arrival in Cairo, Eisele’s transition was smoothed by the existing local Nazi network. CIA declassified files estimate that of the roughly 3,000 Germans who found refuge in Egypt, approximately 300 to 500 were believed to be former SS or Gestapo officers. These men were not just ordinary workers; they were highly specialised assets in rocket science, chemical warfare, and — as in von Leers’ case — propagandists.

Dr Eisele’s arrival was fortuitous for von Leers, who was recovering from a stroke and in poor health. Eisele initially lived at the propagandist’s home, successfully nursing him back to health.

Eisele’s wife joined him in late 1958 arriving in Alexandria on the same ship as Ludwig Pankraz Zind, who was at the centre of an international scandal. Zind was fleeing a one-year prison sentence in West Germany for publicly stating that “not enough Jews were gassed.” Zind was to become a constant presence in the von Leers household, living there at one point. Note: Read my companion piece on the Zind scandal and his flight to Cairo here).

While von Leers worked in the Ministry of National Guidance, Eisele was integrated into the Egyptian military establishment, serving as a physician for the elite Republican Guard and working at the military hospital in Maadi. The two men represented the two halves of the Nazi-Egyptian partnership: Eisele provided the technical and medical expertise for a regime modernising its military, while von Leers provided the psychological and ideological framework to justify its regional ambitions.

Their presence in Cairo was so high-profile that it eventually triggered a Mossad assassination attempt via a mail bomb in 1963, an attack intended for Eisele that underscored just how central these former Nazis had become to the inner workings of the Nasser administration.

The Final Years of “Omar Amin”

Johann von Leers spent his final years as a venerated elder statesman for modern day nazis worldwide, operating from his villa in Cairo. Despite his declining health following his stroke, he remained intellectually active, corresponding with nazis and fascists across Europe and South America, including Colin Jordan and Oswald Mosley in Britain.

His presence in Egypt remained a point of international tension. While West German authorities periodically sought his extradition, the Nasser government consistently refused to cooperate. Von Leers had successfully integrated himself into the fabric of the Egyptian state, he was a prominent figure in the local German-speaking community and a useful propagandist for Arab nationalism.

Death and Legacy

The man who had once been one of Goebbels’ most loyal foot soldiers died in Cairo on March 5, 1965, at the age of 63. His death was marked by a funeral that reflected his dual identity: it was attended by both former SS officers and high-ranking Egyptian officials. He was given an Islamic funeral under his adopted name, Omar Amin.

Von Leers’ death did not signal the end of his influence; rather, it marked the successful implantation of his Hitlerite worldview into a new era. By the time he was laid to rest in 1965, he had kept the Nazi legacy alive in a way that his peers never managed: he had successfully rehashed 1930s antisemitism into the language of 20th-century anti-colonialism.

His “anti-Zionist” antisemitic propaganda efforts were to become so successful that their repercussions are felt more strongly today than they were in his lifetime, with the indoctrinated totally unaware of the provenance.

While the military apparatus of the SS had been crushed in the ruins of Berlin, von Leers ensured its ideological machinery survived, providing a “scholarly” and state-sanctioned framework for race-hate that was to go far beyond the Middle East and into Europe and elsewhere. His legacy remains a testament to the shape-shifting capabilities of antisemitism. His repackaging of antisemitism continues to surface in modern political discourse, often stripped of its Nazi provenance but retaining every bit of its original, poisonous intent.

This is the first instalment of a series on the Nazi rebranding of post-war antisemitism.

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On this day in 1945 the Soviet Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose gates with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” are often used to symbolise the Holocaust. The complex in Nazi occupied Poland was the largest of all the concentration camps and since 2001 in Britain and many other countries January 27 has been marked as Holocaust Memorial Day. While centring on the six million Jewish victims, the day also commemorates the Roma, Sinti, gay, and disabled people targeted by the Nazis, alongside victims of subsequent genocides.

This 25th anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day stands as a grim testament to our recent past — a time when ‘civilised’ Europe succumbed to a racist barbarism that we are still, decades later, struggling to uproot.

Britain’s shame

It is also grim because instead of a milestone the latest figures show a 60% collapse in the number of British schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day in just two years, down to 854 schools. That means just 20% of secondary schools in Britain. This is the price of the lazy failure to tackle antisemitism by so called “anti-Zionists” during the Gaza War. It seems the “path of least resistance” has become the new curriculum; it’s easier for headteachers to stay quiet than to navigate the difficulties of historical truth.

Even when the day is marked, there’s a creeping, sanitising trend at work. We’re seeing commemorations that are so universal they manage to omit the Jews entirely. This isn’t inclusivity; it is cowardice. By stripping the Jewish heart out of the Holocaust to turn it into a vague lesson on “kindness” we are actively erasing both the specific, lethal mechanics of antisemitism and misunderstanding its exceptional power as ideology. You can’t fight a hatred you refuse to name.

Israel’s disgrace

Not to be outdone, the one country you would have thought would respectfully mark the occasion has seen its government absolutely disgrace itself.

Minister for Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli’s “Generation Truth” conference, which is being held today, signals a dangerous shift in Israeli state policy. The “Chikli Doctrine” abandons the traditional alliances with mainstream Jewish communities — who he dismisses as “woke” and “weak” — in favour of a cynical pact with the global far-right. By hosting the ideological heirs of pre-war fascism, including figures from France’s National Rally and the Sweden Democrats, Chikli is effectively laundering the reputations of movements rooted in Nazism and white supremacy. This is not a diplomatic blunder; it is a calculated attempt to build a “Judeo-Christian” front against Islam and the left, even if it means partnering with those who promote the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory.

The human cost of this doctrine is most visible in Chikli’s embrace in Israel of the convicted criminal and former BNP member “Tommy Robinson” last year. By granting him state-level legitimacy and branding him a “courageous leader,” Chikli has directly undermined the British Jewish community’s decades-long struggle against homegrown organised antisemitism and racism.

The 2026 conference honours the late Charlie Kirk, confirming a disturbing reality: the Israeli government is now providing a podium for the very forces that identify “globalist” Jews as the primary threat to Western civilisation. For those fighting antisemitism on the ground, the Chikli Doctrine represents a fundamental betrayal — trading the memory of the Holocaust for a seat at the table of modern populism. If you are interested in more on the conference in Israel then I have written a fuller piece for Searchlight magazine here.

European relativisation

The fight against Holocaust denial is, at its core, a fight against the return of fascism. The perpetrators knew this from the start. From the euphemisms of the Wannsee Protocol — where mass murder was coded as “resettlement” — to the destruction of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau ahead of the Red Army’s arrival, the Nazis engineered a cover-up designed to outlive the war.

Today, as we enter a perilous era without living witnesses, that original deceit has morphed into a more subtle “Double Genocide” theory. This narrative, codified in the 2008 Prague Declaration, seeks to create a false moral equivalence between the crimes of Nazism and Soviet Communism, effectively whitewashing the history of collaboration in Eastern Europe. The Declaration was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2009, leading to the official establishment of August 23 (the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) as the “European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism”.

This softer version of denial does not always seek to erase the dead; instead, it tries to dilute our understanding of the ideology of the killers. By portraying the Holocaust as just one tragedy among many, or as an “understandable” reaction to Soviet repression, revisionists are able to rehabilitate the very fascist movements that were once cast into the political wilderness.

Whether it is the blatant propaganda of the far-right or the institutionalised relativism that blurs historical distinctions, the goal is the same: to dismantle the post-war anti-fascist consensus.

That is why on this, the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the 25th UK commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day we must assert that the battle for historical truth is not just an academic exercise — it is an inseparable part of the struggle against the ideology that produced this barbarism in the first place.

Gerry Gable, the most tenacious post-war anti-fascist Britain ever produced, had been ill for some time when he finally passed away on Saturday, January 3, 2026. He was 88.

For half a century (and more), Gerry was the pulse of Searchlight. He was one of its founders, its publisher, its frequent editor, and the one constant while everyone else came and went (and sometimes returned). In the world of British anti-fascism, the man and the magazine were indistinguishable. Gerry Gable was Searchlight.

In February 2025, after 50 years and almost 500 issues, the final print run rolled off the presses as the magazine was launched as a fully online publication with Gerry’s blessing. Gerry was ill by then; it was the end of an era, but as he knew better than anyone, it was just the next phase in taking on the enemy. All the old editors and other friends that were still around pitched in.

“We’ve come to fix the phone line”

Long before he was an editor, Gerry was a man of action. He had been active in taking on the fascists during the period of the Notting Hill (Notting Dale) Riots in 1958 and defending CND’s early Aldermaston marches. He was a leading figure in the North East London Anti-Fascist Committee. His commitment to the “tradecraft of intelligence” was forged in the early 60s. Most famously, in 1963, Gerry and fellow 62 Group activist Manny Carpel posed as GPO engineers to gain entry to the flat of the Holocaust denier David Irving.

They were after Irving’s private papers to expose his fascist connections. Gerry ended up in court, but he never regretted it. For him, the law was a secondary concern when compared to defending the Jewish community and the exposure of the enemy. He knew Irving was a “wrong ‘un” when most believed at that point that he was a genuine historian, and he set out to prove it. It was this uncompromising, “by any means necessary” spirit that he carried into the founding of Searchlight the following year.

This action lined him up for expulsion from the Communist Party, of which he had been a full-time industrial organiser. They tried to imply that his activities were common criminality, but he pre-empted things and left telling one of their very well-spoken intellectuals who was in charge of the case:

“I don’t want to be in an effing party with people like you anyway.”

In later years, Gerry sometimes said that he left over the Party’s increasingly strong anti-Israel stance. It is likely that both things are true. Even though he left the Party, he carried its legendary education and methods with him for the rest of his life, regardless of the politics.

The Apprenticeship

I met Gerry when I was a teenage activist. He took me under his wing, but being mentored by Gerry wasn’t some cosy academic exercise. It was an education in the “tradecraft” — as he put it — of anti-fascist intelligence gathering.

He taught me that the street fight was only half the battle. Coming out of the 62 Group, Gerry wasn’t afraid of physical confrontation, but he knew the real damage was done through the use of information. He taught me how to trace the owners of post office boxes, raid bins, get addresses from phone numbers, build files on the enemy, and numerous other investigative skills.

But it wasn’t all tradecraft and dossiers. Gerry helped give me a political and cultural education, too. He introduced me to the classics of socialist and anti-fascist literature, from Jack London and Robert Tressell to Stetson Kennedy and Leopold Trepper. Through him, I discovered Woody Guthrie and the songs that gave a voice to the dispossessed. As a treat, when Bob Dylan toured Britain, Gerry would buy a bunch of tickets and take Searchlight staff and volunteers along. He understood that to sustain a lifelong struggle, you needed more than just facts; you needed a culture to anchor you.

My own experience is just one of many. Lots of one-time young Jewish activists are indebted to Gerry — and international editor Graeme Atkinson — for providing an anti-fascist home in a hostile political environment in their student days. Many of those who now hold senior positions in communal organisations or have carried out important work in TV, print, or other areas can recall hearing Searchlight mole Ray Hill speak at their university.

Link to the Past

Gerry maintained a link to the original pre-war and immediate post-war anti-fascists. I stayed at Gerry’s house numerous times, and we would often go visit Spanish Civil War veterans or a 43 Group member that he was in contact with. There were plenty of 62 Group activists still around and involved with Searchlight on a day-to-day basis in the 1980s, and these old comrades acted as if their organisation still existed as they pondered what seemed like hare-brained schemes to a young observer.

The esteem that he was held in by the older generation was driven home to me when I was involved with Anti Fascist Action (AFA). The organisation had a music arm called Cable Street Beat, and in 1988 we held a big concert at the Electric Ballroom in Camden with punk bands topping the bill. I was a member of the Communist Party and a frequent visitor to the party’s St John Street offices in Farringdon, where I knew Battle of Cable Street veteran and former long-standing Communist councillor Solly Kaye volunteered. I was tasked with approaching him to see if he would speak at the event. He had the usual suspicion a Communist veteran had that AFA might be an “ultra-left” outfit. He asked me directly if I was in touch with Gerry Gable. Gerry’s name was the only credential that mattered. The next time I saw Solly was at the Electric Ballroom.

Seeking Justice: The Soviet Union and the War Crimes Campaign

His fight was never just about modern thugs; it was about the unfinished business of the Holocaust. Throughout the 80s, he led a relentless campaign to bring Nazi war criminals living in the UK to justice. He was in touch with the legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and others internationally engaged in hunting down the perpetrators.

This wasn’t just desk work. At the height of the Cold War, Gerry headed into the Soviet Union to gather evidence. He didn’t go alone. Sonia, his wife, was there with him, as always. They travelled through the Eastern Bloc, gaining access to archives and massacre sites that the British establishment would have preferred be left alone.

They brought the evidence home and passed it to the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group. For part of that time, I was the anti-racism officer for the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), and we worked hand-in-glove with Gerry. We mobilised the students while he provided the hard intelligence that forced the government’s hand against significant opposition from those in the establishment that thought we should leave these “old men” alone. That campaign was the engine behind the War Crimes Act 1991.

Entering the Den: Kensington Library, 1991

Gerry’s anti-fascism wasn’t a theory; it was a physical presence. I vividly remember the chaotic day in 1991 we entered Kensington Library in central London. Inside, the League of Saint George — an umbrella Nazi outfit — planned to hold a meeting.

I was with him when he addressed the victorious anti-fascists after the meeting never materialised, and the inevitable long legal fallout that followed. Gerry didn’t care about the police attention or the court dates as long as we did some damage to the enemy. Which we did.

The Tradecraft of Running a “Mole”

Gerry was a master at running “moles” inside the heart of the enemy’s camp. Sometimes they were fascists who had a change of heart and sometimes they were anti-fascists planted inside the enemy camp.

He knew how to manage the psychological pressure of those living double lives inside the National Front or the BNP. It was dangerous work. There were furtive meetings, calls from phone boxes, and the constant, gnawing threat of exposure. Things didn’t always go right, it could be an unpleasant business. But Gerry tried to look after people and all involved knew the risk. He did it because he knew that one well-placed asset could do more damage than a hundred protest marches.

The Price of the Truth

You don’t do what Gerry did without paying a price. The Searchlight offices were discovered by the fascists and threats made on several occasions. More frighteningly, his home was targeted.

When it first happened and he was going away on holiday, Searchlight team members took it in turns to stay at his house so it wouldn’t be broken into while he was away. We were all given worrying instructions on how to use the shotgun propped up at the top of the stairs:

“Aim low, you don’t want to end up on a murder charge.”

This wasn’t adventurism — it was a war of attrition. He lived a life of high security, checking under his car for bombs and suspicious of any unusual activity.

The Courtroom as a Battlefield

Gerry fought many legal cases with the fascists. We were involved in one significant one together: Roberts v Gable, Silver and Searchlight Magazine Ltd (2007). We’d run a piece on the internal civil war within the BNP, and two of their members decided to sue us for libel.

It was an attempt to bankrupt the magazine and silence Gerry as author and me as the then editor. We fought them on “neutral reportage” — the right to report on the internal wranglings of extremist groups without being held liable for the lies they tell each other. We won in the Court of Appeal. It was a victory for investigative journalists across the country, and a massive “no” to those who thought they could use the High Court to shut us down.

A Man of Conviction

Gerry could be a difficult man. In a number of areas of the work, it was his way or no way. This caused tensions if you worked with him and inevitably was one of the reasons that I left Searchlight, and then later the split with Hope not Hate came about.

Nevertheless, he didn’t hold grudges forever. After going our separate ways, friendly relations resumed. Gerry once paid a visit to Bob Crow, then General Secretary of the RMT trade union — no doubt to secure some funding. By then I was working for the union and went down to say hello. After decades of what was once daily contact, we hadn’t spoken much for a while. Gerry greeted me warmly and before we parted said: “Don’t be a stranger, Steve.”

At the end of the day, Gerry being difficult had a context. His “difficulty” was his armour — a necessary survival mechanism in a world where the enemy wanted him dead and rival anti-fascists found Searchlight a thorn in their side.

Conversely, Gerry was completely non-partisan and was as happy to work with a Tory or pass information to the police on fascist criminality as he was to work with a Trotskyist or Anarchist from a local anti-fascist group. He didn’t care what someone professed to believe but judged them on their (anti-fascist) actions alone. Sectarians — and there were plenty of them — found this approach difficult to reconcile and attacked him for it.

The Necessary Man

Gerry was capable of putting fascist groups in a state of paranoid frenzy and he revelled in it. He was their number one hate figure, regularly attacked in their publications. Sometimes, if we had a big success, he would phone them up and taunt them.

He was a man of the print era — nothing beat the smell of a glossy cover and a stack of magazines — but he had the foresight to see the battle moving online. He saw the launch of the new Searchlight website before he passed, knowing that while the medium changes, the methodology — hard intelligence over empty rhetoric — must remain.

Gerry Gable didn’t just witness the history of post-war British anti-fascism; he wrote it, edited it, and defended it. Britain is a significantly less hospitable place for fascists today because Gerry spent sixty years infiltrating, attacking and undermining them.

There is a famous quote by Bertolt Brecht that, while written about revolutionaries, sums up Gerry’s anti-fascism better than any long-winded eulogy:

“There are those who struggle for a day and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year and they are better. There are those who struggle many years, and they are very good. But there are those who struggle all their lives: these are the indispensable ones.”

Gerry’s legacy lives on. Lotta Continua!

Note on the text: The concluding quote is from the poem In Praise of the Revolutionary (originally appearing in the play The Mother, 1932) by Bertolt Brecht.

The British Left — if you can call it ‘left’ nowadays — has essentially evicted the working class. Activists today are more interested in conducting purity tests than fighting for economic justice. Whether it is the performative drama of trans activism or the elevation of Palestine into a subcultural fetish, the result is always the same. These causes have been repurposed as lifestyle accessories for the Parasitic Left: a caste of ultra-left politicos who produce no material value, preferring instead to feed off the institutions and moral capital of the labour movement, telling us what not to say and what products we should boycott. What was once a movement forged in the heat of the industrial furnace — built on the raw power of class solidarity — is in danger of collapsing into a neurotic, fractured heap.

New Times, New Tribes: The Glossy Deconstruction of the British Left

To understand how this decay set in, you have to look back to the 1980s — specifically to the glossy pages of the Eurocommunist Marxism Today. Because it was a magazine on the shelves of major newsagents like WH Smith (unlike the traditional communist Morning Star newspaper of the “old guard”) people sometimes forget that this was the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the intellectual cockpit of the British Left.

It was here in September 1978 the historian Eric Hobsbawm asked: “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” arguably starting the entire debate about the decline of the traditional working class as the sole revolutionary agent. After the hideous defeat of the Miners’ Strike in 1985 he seemed to have been proven correct.

Under Martin Jacques’ editorship, it wasn’t just a magazine; it was a debating chamber for a world that was rapidly changing. It was fashionable: this was the era of Gorbachev, Glasnost and Perestroika. There was a palpable sense of hope that the old, rigid structures of the East were opening up, that a “New Times” was coming where socialism could be democratic, pluralistic, and culturally vibrant. The Soviet Union was no longer the bogeyman. Nobody would have predicted that within a few years the Soviet Union would have collapsed and the CPGB liquidated into a short-lived left-wing ginger group called the Democratic Left.

I was a member of the CPGB at the time and our understanding of the pivot toward identity was that it was an attempt at broadening the front. Taken with the relatively recent 1970s English translation of one-time Italian Communist Party General Secretary Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the party intellectuals were afire with their interpretation of his concept of “hegemony.”

For Marxism Today, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony was the intellectual engine that transformed the journal from a traditional Marxist publication into the birthplace of modern identity politics. Led by theorists like Stuart Hall, the magazine argued that the ruling class maintains power not just through the police or the law (coercion), but through “hegemony” — the subtle cultivation of popular “consent” by making its own values seem like “common sense.”

For the magazine, Margaret Thatcher proved the case for a Gramscian understanding because she had successfully built a new hegemony by appealing to the identities and aspirations of ordinary people, not just their economic class. In fact, it is widely considered to be the pages of Marxism Today that coined the word “Thatcherism” to describe her distinct radical version of Conservative politics.

In the pages of Marxism Today, Hall and others argued that if the Left wanted to build a “counter-hegemony,” it could no longer rely on the “industrial working class” as a single, uniform block. Instead, they had to engage in a “war of position” across the entire cultural landscape — winning over diverse groups whose identities were defined by gender, race, sexuality, and lifestyle. By applying Gramsci’s ideas, Marxism Today effectively argued that “identity politics” was not a distraction from the revolution, but the primary site where the struggle for cultural and political dominance would be won or lost.

So, when Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) stood on the picket lines, it wasn’t about competitive victimhood. It was about material solidarity. Co-founded by Mark Ashton — who was made famous in the 2014 film Pride — what is left out of his story in the sanitised film is that he was general secretary of the Young Communist League and a member of the CPGB. Identity was the bridge that led back to the central struggle against capital.

What was known as “Eurocommunism” was an expansion of the “we.” But that hopeful project carried the seeds of its own destruction. The “New Times” didn’t lead to a new socialism; it led to the professionalisation of grievance. Careerists hijacked the tools of the 80s, stripped away the materialist foundation, and domesticated radicalism into “Diversity and Inclusion.” They took a dream of liberation and turned it into a managerial career path.

This trajectory from radical theory to administrative compliance found its ultimate expression in the rise of New Labour. If Marxism Today was the laboratory, then Tony Blair was the first successful commercial product — a version of ‘progress’ that had been thoroughly sterilised for the market. Margaret Thatcher saw Blair as a personal success story for her own politics.

Today, we see the hollowed-out remains of that project in Keir Starmer. While the pioneers of ‘New Times’ imagined a more vibrant socialism, Starmer represents the final, stagnant form of the professional manager. His instinct is not to mobilise the masses, but to supervise them. Under his leadership, the transition is complete: the party of labour has been transformed into a sprawling regulatory body, a gatekeeper whose primary function is to police the aspirations of the working class rather than to realise them.

The Death of British Youth Subculture and the rise of the Grey Guard

What we are witnessing with today’s activists is the counter-revolution disguised as counter-culture. The decades following the Second World War were alive with the organic, defiant energy of youth subculture: Teddy Boys, Beatniks, Mods, Rockers, Hippies, Punks, Skinheads, Rude Boys and Casuals.

These movements were unruly, sometimes ugly, rejections of the status quo by young people, who in the main were not university educated. They were carving out a space for themselves away from the prying eyes of the state and the suffocating morality of their “betters.” They ruined many a Bank Holiday weekend for the stuffy guardians of the old order of British society.

In the 1960s, some 5% of young people went to university. Today, despite eye-watering fees and no student grant, that figure stands around 50%. The universities have helped create a sterile, campus-bred tribalism. Modern activism is the inverse of those old subcultures; it’s a rebellion towards authority. It’s a demand for more policing, more linguistic surveillance, and more administrative oversight.

This transition was fueled by the survival and mutation of the Trotskyist sects. While the CPGB was busy theorising “New Times,” groups like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Militant Tendency and Socialist Action were perfecting the art of the “front organisation.” They mastered the ability to take a genuine social grievance — anti-racism or anti-war — and wrap them in a rigid, bureaucratic structure. These Trotskyist groups were the training grounds for the Parasitic Left. They taught a generation of students how to dominate a committee, how to use procedural rules to silence dissent, and how to treat politics as a 24/7 managerial occupation. When they gave up on revolution in the 1990s, these activists didn’t go back to the factory floor — they didn’t come from there to begin with. Instead, they took their skills in “organising” into the burgeoning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments of the state and the corporate world.

While the Left was winning the “war of position” in the student union and the media office, it was losing the war of survival on the ground. As the academics secured their grip on the language of the movement, real wages for the bottom 20% of earners began a multi-decade stagnation.

This transition has been overseen by the “Grey Guard” — the pensioner survivors of the original counter-culture who successfully completed their “long march” into the institutions. Protected by property wealth and final-salary pensions, they treat politics as a lifestyle choice.

Reclaiming the Universal Left

To survive, the labour movement must excise the Parasitic Left. When class analysis is liquidated, it is replaced by the “socialism of fools” — a conspiratorial worldview that reduces the machinery of Capital to the machinations of a ‘cosmopolitan’ elite. By abandoning universalism, the Left has created a vacuum where identitarian antisemitism thrives, shielded by the very administrative gatekeepers who claim to police bigotry.

Rebuilding requires a return to the primacy of productive labour and objective truth. A movement built on “lived experience” and individual feelings is a movement built on sand, incapable of confronting the concrete power of capital.

We must abandon the narrow theatre of ‘diversity’ and return to the war for the basics of human survival. We should be fighting to tear the essentials of life — housing, energy, and water — out of the hands of the market entirely.

This requires a brutal honesty that the Parasitic Left cannot stomach: it means confronting the reliance on imported cheap labour used by capital to break the back of domestic bargaining power. We don’t need more ‘awareness’; we need a movement that makes it impossible to profit from a worker’s need for a roof and a warm home.

We must purge the hollow language of “allyship” and recognise that the Amazon warehouse worker and the NHS nurse are not “intersecting” identities, but the same material force. The “we” has been sacrificed for the “me.” It is time to stop asking how a struggle affects our specific group and start asking how it affects working people as a whole. The Parasitic Left has spent forty years encouraging us to look inward at our own reflections; it is time for the labour movement to look outward at the world it needs to win.

Yiddish as a first language was already largely gone by the time the majority of the Jewish population migrated out of the East End of London in the decades following the Second World War. By the 1980s, the Jewish East End held only remnants of its past, as the community resettled along the North-West London corridor — to places like Golders Green, Edgware, and Hendon — or east towards Gants Hill.

What isn’t discussed often is that the language didn’t vanish overnight. For several decades, it was replaced by “Yinglish,” a hybrid tongue that mirrored the linguistic evolution seen in New York City.

A Jewish Way of Speaking

For the older generation, English — though peppered with Yiddish loanwords — was often spoken with a distinct, melodic intonation. The accent persisted even when no Yiddish words were present in a sentence. This cadence was famously caricatured in Maureen Lipman’s British Telecom adverts in the 1980s, most notably in the conversation with her grandson: “He gets an ology and he says he’s failed... you get an ology, you’re a scientist!”

Where there had once been a preponderance of Jews in tailoring and cabinet making, the post-war period saw a shift toward market trading and taxi driving. Such was the concentration of cabbies in Gants Hill that it became known as the “Big Rank.”

The language of the markets was the language of the street, and many of these terms eventually bled into London’s wider lexicon. It was not unheard of for a non-Jewish trader to describe a garment as a “nice bit of schmutter.” Today, words like chutzpah, schlep, and shmooze have entered the common vernacular, requiring no translation.

My father, born in Stepney in 1938, used to recite a ditty from his childhood in the markets. It almost certainly refers to the wares of Petticoat Lane. Over time, he replaced some terms with nonsense words, but the original lyrics were likely a variation of a Barton Brothers comedy skit or Max Bacon’s pre-war song “Beigels” (“Bagel” is an Americanisation of the word). In it, Bacon declares himself — in a thick accent — the “King” of the beigel sellers, listing the chaotic offerings of the market in rapid-fire succession:

“Latkes, gatkes, varenikas, burekas, lokshen, trifle, shmaltz and meat.”

• Latkes: Fried potato pancakes.

• Gatkes: Long-john underwear.

• Varenikas: Boiled dumplings (similar to pierogi).

• Burekas: Savory pastries filled with potato or cheese.

• Lokshen: Thin noodles used for soup or sweet puddings.

• Trifle: The classic English dessert.

• Schmaltz: Rendered chicken fat.

The Sound of the Suburbs

The Jewish traders and taxi drivers brought the “Cockney” of the East End with them to the suburbs. Their everyday patter used standard English as a base, flavoured with a seamless mix of Yiddish and East End slang. This wasn’t an affectation; it was their natural tongue.

My maternal grandmother had a brother whom I knew as “Uncle Elf.” In the childish world of dwarfs and pixies, I thought it was a fantastic name. It was years before I realised his name was actually “Alf,” and that was simply how East Enders pronounced it. His given name was Abraham, but like all his siblings, he never used his “Jewish” name.

The market inspector, who wielded the power to evict a stallholder for minor infractions, was known in market slang as a “Toby.” If he had a reputation for prejudice, he might be called a “right mamzer” (bastard). Interestingly, terms for gelt (money) were almost always Cockney: a pony (£25), a ton (£100), or a monkey (£500).

The language was also rich with specific shades of “foolishness.” A Shmo was gullible; a Shmerel was a simpleton; a Shlemiel was clumsily inept. The “sh” sound also dominated anatomical insults, often used — much like their English counterparts — to describe an unpleasant person as a penis: Shmock (or the US Shmuck), Shvantz, and the exception that proves the rule, Putz.

Some phrases survived entirely in the original Yiddish:

“Hostu gelt, bistu a Knacker; hostu nisht, bistu Kacke.” (If you have money, you’re a big shot; if you have nothing, you’re shit.)

Other phrases were translated literally into English but retained their Yiddish soul. If someone said he hoped their friend would receive good news from the doctor, the response would be: “From your lips to God’s ears” (Fun zayn mol, in Gots oyer).

The End of a Good Fress at Blooms

For several decades, the pinnacle of haimishe (homely) Jewish dining was Blooms. With branches in Whitechapel and Golders Green (and briefly Edgware), it was the place for wurst (kosher salami), Viennas (beef sausages), Latkes, and the “Jewish penicillin” of chicken soup — all served with rye bread. Wurst and eggs was the kosher answer to the Full English fry-up.

The waiters were notorious for their briskness, often whisking your plate away before you had finished your last bite. It became a standard joke in Jewish households: if a host rushed a guest, the guest would retort, “Where am I, in Blooms?”

Blooms was the standard-bearer for traditional Ashkenazi Jewish fare, but tastes have since shifted. The East End restaurant closed in 1996 and the Golders Green branch followed in 2010, surviving now only as a supermarket brand. Today’s Jewish restaurants lean toward Israeli staples like shawarma and hummus — a trend that is, to me at least, a disappointment.

For the old-style food, you need to visit B&K in Edgware or Hatch End for salt beef on rye, kneidlach, and chopped liver. I used to meet Len Rolnick from the anti-fascist 43 Group at the Edgware branch when he would drive over from Spain — where he lived — hungry for the tastes of his own youth.

While the Beigel Bake on Brick Lane still draws crowds of tourists, local institutions like Carmelli’s in North-West London continue to serve the community’s daily needs.

Nostalgia

Just as the pre-war generation mourned a bygone era, those of us who grew up post-war are witnessing our own world slowly slip away — from the way we talk to the way we eat. Nevertheless, in many practical ways, the community is stronger than ever; organisations like Jewish Care and the Community Security Trust (CST) are more advanced than anything that came before.

Nostalgia is invariably a rose-tinted lens, but who wouldn’t want to revisit, just for a moment, the sounds, the smells, and the singular tastes of their youth?

Harry Silver – my grandfather – walked into a trap when he attempted to rob Harrow Post Office in the spring of 1955. In court the police claimed that the man with three convictions was known to them, and having spotted him and an accomplice case the joint the night before they suspected that on the Saturday night they would break in. They were lying in wait when at the stroke of midnight a glass window shattered and the first of the men climbed in with a key to a safe hoping to get their hands on £60,000 (£1.3 million in today’s money).

Set up by a “Coppers’ Nark”

In court a surprising turn of events took place when Detective-sergeant A Gibson was giving evidence. H Lester, representing Harry, asked the officer to tell him about “coppers’ narks” and claimed his client was coaxed into committing the offence.

Harry was then permitted to give evidence in the witness box and said that he was set up by a customer at the barber’s shop where he worked as an assistant. He claimed that Bob Buckland – a man who sold stamps behind the counter – had enticed him by saying that he could give him a key to one of the safes and that the job would be “the easiest thing in the world” to do.

When Buckland was called by the prosecution to give evidence he contradicted the police story that they just happened on the hapless thieves as they were casing the joint. He claimed not that he approached Harry, but that Harry had approached him in the barber shop and that at first he thought it was a joke but nevertheless reported it to his superiors who contacted the police. Acting upon their instructions he had further meetings and when asked provided a key on the orders of his superiors for Harry to make a wax impression of.

Buckland insisted Harry approached him, and Harry insisted it was the other way round and that he was badgered into doing it, and the temptation of the easy money was too much to resist.

Harry was almost certainly lying, but then so were the police, and in all likelihood Buckland’s version of the story was true. Harry and his friend Joe Stevens were both sentenced to two years’ imprisonment while their driver got away with a non-custodial sentence.

Entrapment wasn’t an acceptable defence but the police conduct was enough of a concern for the case to be referred to the Home Secretary.

The Lowlife

The acclaimed Jewish East End novelist Alexander Baron wrote a novel called Lowlife, set in a similar period about a lowlife gambler who was also called Harry – Harryboy Boas – and the two certainly inhabited the same world of petty criminality.

The criminality of Harry – my grandad – was an open family secret, known about but not talked about. At various points in his life he was a market trader, he once had a stall at Petticoat Lane market and then on his release from prison – he was hardly employable at that point – had a market stall with my father selling cakes and sweets at various markets in London and just beyond. As a youngster I also used to work with them, on weekends and school holidays. While my dad cracked away trying to bring in a crowd Harry taught me how to make a sturdy seat out of two empty boxes. He wasn’t a grafter.

Before the TV series made the phrase ubiquitous in the 1980s Harry would say “only fools and horses work” and took the piss out of his brother who would go off to work with his lunchbox saying work was a “mugs game”.

Harry’s sister, Eva, was an urbane, well-spoken woman and it seemed hard to believe the two were related. Harry was rough round the edges in all ways, coarse and in Yinglish – that mix of Yiddish and English that was spoken by that generation – a bit of a poyer (someone uncultured).

I made a joke once to Eva about Harry being an old lag and was brought down a peg or two by her response. She didn’t condemn him at all: “You don’t know how we grew up” was her response. She was basically saying that out of poverty people did what they needed to do to survive.

Harry the ligner

Sometimes Harry would tell me a story about his youth which I would later recount to my dad. If he knew it wasn’t true he would tell me to “take it with a pinch of salt, he’s a bit of a ligner (liar).”

One lie that he told throughout the later years of his life was that he had been a boxer. It is probably true that he did learn to box; it was a very popular pastime in the Jewish East End.

The bit that definitely wasn’t true was that he claimed to be Harry “Kid” Silver, a prominent figure in the lightweight and welterweight divisions in the UK from the late 1930s through the 1940s. “Kid Silver” faced many of the top contenders and champions in British boxing at the time. Though his official professional record included approximately 85 bouts, Silver, like many boxers of his time, participated in countless more non-official or exhibition matches, making him a fixture in the local boxing community of East London and beyond.

When Kid Silver was at the height of his boxing career they didn’t even have the same name. Harry was still using the surname he was born with – Vitofsky – only later changing it by deed poll. The lie became an issue when Harry was in the Jewish Home and Hospital in Tottenham where he was cared for in the later years of his life. The staff wanted to include an article in their magazine about their famous resident who had told them so much about his life as a boxer. My dad had to put them straight to kill the piece.

A story that was likely true

My father used to tell me a story that I was never sure was true as he had inherited Harry’s ability to bend the truth when he wanted to. He said the two of them were in the East End when they ran into the infamous Jewish gangster Jack “Spot” Comer. It was shortly after Harry had been released from prison and neither Jack nor Harry lived in East End any longer. Jack greeted Harry and said to him “Harry, have you seen what they done to me?” pointing to the scars on his face.

In 1956 Jack “Spot” and his wife were ambushed near their London flat by a group led by “Mad” Frankie Fraser, acting on behalf of Comer’s rival, Billy Hill. Comer was slashed with razors on the face and required stitches, leading to Fraser and an accomplice receiving seven-year prison sentences for the violent assault.

My dad was astonished that Jack spoke with a thick Yiddish accent which wasn’t how he imagined him at all. What makes me think the story is likely true is that some years later I saw a TV interview and he spoke exactly how my dad had described.

The mugs game: When a petty crook invented a champion

Harry Silver left a family history coloured by petty crime and colourful fabrication. From the probable truth of running into a scarred Jack “Spot” Comer to his grandest fiction as a champion boxer, his two-year sentence for the Post Office robbery, arguably an act of entrapment, was less a climax than another chapter in a life lived on the margins. He embodied the “lowlife” he shared a world with, forever preferring the wit and risk of a con to an honest day’s graft, believing “only fools and horses work.”

Yet, his sister Eva’s staunch refusal to condemn him hints at a deeper, more sympathetic truth: that his criminality was, in part, a survival tactic born of poverty. Harry’s great lie – claiming the identity of the famous boxer Harry “Kid” Silver – was his final, audacious attempt to inject romance and significance into a life marked by small-time schemes. This desire for grandeur, revealed when his own son had to dismantle the myth, is perhaps the most enduring part of his legacy: a grandfather who preferred the thrill of a good story, true or otherwise, over the plain facts of his own complicated life.

The controversy surrounding tonight’s Aston Villa vs. Maccabi Tel Aviv football match in Birmingham runs deeper than any typical sporting fixture. With a massive police presence, security intelligence concerns, and a widely debated ban on visiting fans, the game itself is merely the backdrop. What’s actually on show is the relentless political gravity that seems to follow any Israeli club onto the international stage.

The banning of the visiting fans was loudly cheered by those demanding a wider cultural boycott. As the protests mount this evening, you have to ask: How many people out there, red in the face and waving signs, actually know what the word “Maccabi” means?

The original revolt

The name, plastered across the shirts of the Tel Aviv squad, is borrowed from Judah Maccabee, a leader in the Maccabean Revolt, a successful Jewish rebellion that took place in the 2nd century BCE – a militant struggle for national self-determination and against the cultural and religious imperialism of the Seleucid Empire.

This wasn’t merely a military occupation; it was a campaign of cultural annihilation. The Seleucids weren’t content to simply collect taxes; they were attempting to impose Hellenistic customs and suppress Jewish worship. In short, it was cultural imperialism of the most aggressive sort.

Judah mounted a guerrilla campaign, striking devastating blows against the much larger Seleucid forces. His success earned him a fearsome nickname. Maccabee – which is widely believed to derive from the ancient Hebrew word for hammer, symbolising the powerful, crushing strikes he repeatedly delivered against his enemies.

That success led to the liberation of Jerusalem and the rededication of the Temple (the basis for the Chanukah festival which takes place in December), and a glorious, if ultimately temporary, spell of self-rule. Though he was killed in battle in 160 BCE, his anti-imperialist fight laid the groundwork for the establishment of the first independent Jewish state in over four centuries. The independent state lasted nearly a century. Then, a new imperial power seized on internal division: the Roman General Pompey marched his army into Jerusalem, conquered the city, and once again the Jews were forced to live under the yoke of imperialism.

From ancient hammer to modern revival

Fast forward two millennia, past the pogroms and the relentless tide of European antisemitism. The 19th century brought a new movement, Zionism, led by those who sought, through sport and physical education, to create “new” proud Jews who were not cowed by antisemites.

The Maccabi World Union has its roots in this movement. The first of what was to become the Maccabi clubs was the Israelite Gymnastics Association, founded in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey, in 1895 by Jewish youths who were excluded from local sports clubs due to antisemitism.

The football club Maccabi Jaffa was formed in 1906 and became Maccabi Tel Aviv later on in that decade. Tel Aviv was founded as a self-reliant Jewish settlement in 1909, born out of a desire for autonomy and cultural revival, serving as a direct rejection of life under the conditions of the Ottoman empire. A group of sixty-six Jewish families, tired of the crowded and restrictive environment in the ancient port of Jaffa, which was controlled by Ottoman authorities, sought to establish a modern, Hebrew-speaking city that would embody the anti-colonial vision of Zionism.

As similar Jewish sports clubs proliferated across Europe and Palestine, the need for a unified body grew. This culminated in the formal establishment of the Maccabi World Union in 1921, with its flagship event, the Maccabiah Games (the “Jewish Olympics”), first taking place in Mandate Palestine in 1932.

Rebirth from the catastrophe

The Maccabi World Union faced a devastating challenge after World War II and the Holocaust, which decimated its membership and shattered many affiliated clubs across Europe. Despite this catastrophic loss, the movement became revitalised, driven by the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

The headquarters, which had moved from Berlin to London in 1933, shifted permanently to Israel following the establishment of the state in 1948, and successfully revived the Maccabiah Games, holding the Third Maccabiah in 1950, after a 15-year hiatus. Maccabi became more than just sport; it was infrastructure, a place of gathering.

The British anti-fascist 43 Group’s inaugural meeting in April 1946 was held at the Maccabi Centre in Compayne Gardens in Hampstead. The connection to that ancient, defiant rebellion was never forgotten. The 43 Group, in its publications, directly quoted the first book of Maccabees:

“It is better for us to die in battle than to witness the evils befalling our nation and our sanctuary.”

So tonight, as police lines are formed in Birmingham and the protests unfold, the name Maccabi holds a significance that transcends the football fixture. It isn’t merely a sports brand; it is a centuries-old declaration of resistance, a memory of defiance against those who sought to extinguish Jewish culture and self-determination.

Mike Cohen was one of Britain’s great Jewish anti-fascists, whose significant contribution to the movement came through his camera lens. He passed away in October 2002 at the age of 67, and with the passage of time I often think of Mike, convinced that he deserves to be remembered. Mike came from a time when proud Jewish anti-fascists were at the core of the movement and often the wider left.

The making of an activist

Mike was born into a Jewish East End of London family and like many young Jews of his time was apprenticed into the tailoring industry. He was a lifelong socialist, starting out as an activist in the youth section of Poale Zion which led him to work in Israel as a volunteer on a kibbutz in the early 1950s and on a power station.

Back in England Mike was called up for compulsory military service and to his horror found that he was to be posted to Germany. He had lost family in the Holocaust and really did not want to be there. Despite his pleas to be posted elsewhere he was stationed there anyway. It turned out the Germans were to be the least of his problems. He faced considerable antisemitism from his fellow soldiers, it was a miserable time, although there were also people who physically defended him. Both the miserable experience of antisemitism and the fact that there were also allies was something that stayed with him.

Upon his discharge, Mike left that dark chapter behind to pursue his education and further activism. He enrolled at the London School of Economics and went on to become a social worker, working with the homeless and mentally ill. Later, Mike ran an old people’s home for Camden Council in north London. For much of that time he was a member of Hampstead Labour Party but didn’t remain a member and for the rest of his life he was a non-aligned socialist.

The 62 Group and the founding of Searchlight

Mike was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and it was on their annual Aldermaston march in 1963 that he first met fellow anti-fascist Gerry Gable. The march was attacked by fascists. They were part of the group who physically overturned a fascists’ car in one clash. Gerry and Mike worked together after that doing intelligence gathering for the anti-fascist 62 Group and then went on to found the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight together.

As a 62 Group activist Mike was arrested on at least two occasions. In 1964 he was arrested at Kerbella Street when he helped break through the police line and chase John Tyndall and his Greater Britain Movement off the streets. Another time he was arrested for attempting to break into a print shop in Stoke Newington that was printing fascist material.

Sometime in the late 1960s a core group of 62 Group activists decided that their sometimes comically amateur – albeit successful – activities needed a more professional approach. They all learnt some self-defence – they were invariably pretty handy in a fight anyway – but they were also each given a specific skill. And that is how Mike became trained as a photographer.

Mike was much more than a single issue anti-fascist. He was active in the squatter’s movement and assisted arrested members of the Angry Brigade out of principle – although he did not share their politics – the anarchist urban guerrilla group responsible for a series of small-scale bombings and armed actions against the establishment in the early 1970s.

Mike was renowned for how game he was when out taking pictures and was at some of the most significant events of his time. He was at Red Lion Square when the police violently assaulted protestors in 1974 at the demonstration against the National Front. He was also at the Wapping print strike picket line when a Morning Star photographer was trampled by a police horse and dived in to rescue him from further injury. He also took pictures of the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp and remained in contact with activists from there.

Memories of Mike

My first memory of Mike is from some time in 1987 or 1988 when as a teenage volunteer with Searchlight Gerry Gable sent me to meet him. We had found out that one of the small fascist groups – they were all small back then – had booked a room somewhere and we wanted to secretly photograph the event. The only way to do that was to do a recce beforehand and see the layout of the place and work out where to be positioned on the day.

Mike had it all planned out. “I’ll do the talking and you follow my lead,” he said as he handed me an enamel Labour Party badge to put on my jacket and put another one on his. He then knocked on the door of the venue and issued a charm offensive on the poor chap we were lying to, who was showing us around, on what a marvellous place this would be for local Labour Party meetings. “Do you think this room would be the right size for our meetings?” he asked me as we made mental notes of where everything was and where best to be positioned for taking photos surreptitiously a few days later.

Whenever there was a fascist gathering Mike was invariably there shooting black and white photos for Searchlight. Searchlight magazine was printed in black and white in those days, and that was what was needed. Except printing photographs in black and white meant that the photos had to go through a laborious development process. I used to have to sit in Mike’s kitchen in his flat in Hackney, which he had modified so that it could be totally blacked out as a dark room, while the film went through the chemical process and eventually pictures emerged at the other end.

Over the years I spent a lot of time with Mike. When he was holding his camera taking pictures of fascists it was often necessary to keep an eye on him as when he held a camera up he couldn’t see what was going on around him. “Every time I take a picture of one of these bastards I feel like I am shooting them with a gun,” Mike liked to say. On at least one occasion a fascist spotted him and shouted “I suppose we are gonna be in Searchlight next month.”

Will we ever see the likes of him again?

Mike was an unassuming man, and like many of his 62 Group comrades rarely boastful of the gung-ho activities that he had been involved in. Invariably it would come out through a story he would be telling you about someone else, but as the story grew you realised he was also there.

In later years Mike devoted himself solely to taking photos, from which he barely eked out a living. His pictures were mostly published in three publications: Searchlight, The Morning Star and the New Worker.

At Mike’s funeral I was asked to say a few words on the influence he had on younger anti-fascists. I had known him all my adult life and learnt as much from him as any other of that older generation of 62 Group anti-fascists that had taken me under their wing. I don’t recall what I said but I have an abiding memory of something. It isn’t uncommon for a coffin to be draped in a flag, but Mike’s was draped in two. Mike may have been an unaligned socialist but his comrades were very much aligned. His Jewish 62 Group comrades draped it in an Israeli flag representing his Jewish background and roots and his communist comrades in a Soviet flag representing his lifelong commitment to socialism. I often wonder, particularly in these hardest of times for Jewish anti-fascists, whether I will ever see the likes of that again.

The hope for peace and the challenge of statehood

It feels like the storm clouds of war are lifting amid a cautious optimism, above all amongst Israelis and Palestinians, that the war – the war that Hamas initiated on October 7, 2023, with its hideous massacres of peace activist kibbutzniks and music festival goers – is coming to an end.

Will peace eventually bring Palestinian statehood? One thing is for sure: a Palestinian state is not imminent. It would require mutual, verifiable recognition by both the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli leadership of each other’s right to exist. This political opening will only emerge with Hamas removed from power and the ascendance of a solid and moderate Palestinian Authority leadership, alongside a significant political shift in Israel that sees Netanyahu replaced by a leader willing to negotiate credible statehood.

Politics moves fast, though, and Netanyahu is deeply unpopular in Israel – the war kept him in power – and a post-war election may well finish him. Hamas is a husk of an organisation, having lost the war it started. Its backer, Iran, is also now in a sorry military state, and its other proxies – which do most of its fighting – have been severely damaged.

Whether a renewed Palestinian national movement can pull together a leadership that can steer it to nationhood – one that will accept the right of its neighbour Israel to exist – is yet to be seen. We have come close before in my lifetime and those of several generations before, and each time the opportunity to miss an opportunity was never missed due to failures of leadership on both sides, driven by mutual distrust, intransigence on territorial compromise, and the continuous expansion of Israeli settlements, which act as a principal obstacle to accepting the political facts of a viable Palestinian state.

The anti-war movement: Rebels without a cause?

In spite of the seeming futility of war, the situation now is not the same as it was pre-war. What will this mean for the anti-war activists and their organisations without the war to oppose? Will they carry on regardless, an anti-war movement with no war?

After the Iraq War, the anti-war movement that it spawned – or at least a shadow of it – trundled on. It begged the question: what war was it opposing?

And then a new war came along and they were back in the game. Technically, it was a new war, but during the Iraq War, a very strange happening occurred. In spite of the fact that the Iraq War had nothing to do with Palestine or Israel – and that Israel was not part of the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 – the slogan “Freedom for Palestine” was raised by the leadership from the very first demonstration in London.

What would seem like a bizarre happening to any neutral observer is explained by the moment that significant elements within the left-wing leadership of the anti-war movement forged pragmatic, if ideologically problematic, alliances with UK-based Islamist organisations, most notably the Muslim Association of Britain. This alignment has persisted, driven by shared anti-imperialist narratives and the rising influence of contested post-colonial political theory on the left. Unsurprisingly, this coalition, when roused, has unfortunately become associated with overtly antisemitic rhetoric and acts, such as the widespread use of slogans calling for the destruction of Israel at demonstrations.

Except with this war – more than 20 years after the Stop the War Coalition raised the “Freedom for Palestine” slogan – it really was about Palestine. They finally got the war they wanted. The one where the perfidious Zionists, the simplistic arch-villain of the movement’s narrative, really is the enemy. Never mind that the Zionists did not start the war in the first place.

The weaponisation of suffering and what It means for Britain’s Jews

The end of this war will bring great relief to Britain’s Jews, who have seen antisemitism go from being something on the margins of society to something they have had to face in their workplaces, schools, hospitals, and every other public sphere where they rarely encountered it before. Data from the Community Security Trust (CST) confirms a historic surge in anti-Jewish incidents across the UK coinciding with the conflict.

People who were shocked by the death and destruction that came with Israel’s military response to Hamas often resorted to the old conspiratorial tropes and lies that were conjured up about the Jews throughout the ages, with no idea of their actual provenance.

When Jews complained, they were gaslit – told this was just about Zionists, a term that suddenly everyone claimed to understand, their ignorance only surpassed by their arrogance.

Or, it was all understandable and inconsequential to complain about hurt Jewish feelings in Britain when there was a humanitarian crisis being framed by critics as “genocide” being committed by Israel with thousands of Palestinians losing their lives. The schadenfreude – and really only a German word will suffice – of Israel’s opponents at the notion that the victims of the Nazi genocide (which is how the word came into use) committed genocide is palpable. This hyperbolic use of “genocide” – a word meant to describe the systematic extermination of a people – risks devaluing its meaning and is often deployed as a powerful, but historically inaccurate, rhetorical weapon against the Jewish state.

This atmosphere of gaslighting and rhetorical hostility culminated in real-world violence. The community was continuously gaslit until a terrorist attack occurred at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. An assailant, identified as Jihad Al-Shamie, drove a car into people and then attacked with a knife. Two worshippers – Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby – were killed before Al-Shamie was fatally shot by police. The authorities continue to investigate the attack, which included a call in which the attacker pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, as an act influenced by Islamist ideology.

The anti-Zionists return to the margins: Hope for the future of the left

Will the end of the war see an end to the constant hectoring of Britain’s Jews? Only when the anti-Zionists are driven to the margins of the British left will that happen. And if the actual war is over, then those who have been fighting the anti-Zionist war since the Iraq War (and in truth, long before) can go back to doing that on the margins while the rest of the left turns itself to the task of organising on jobs, housing, the economy, the NHS, and other critical domestic issues that have been neglected for the last two years and allowed the seemingly inexorable rise of right-wing forces.

For decades, the playbook for fighting a racist movement with anti-immigration at the fore was simple: expose it as a fringe ideology led by figures with ties to Nazism. But that strategy has become obsolete. The political landscape has shifted not because there is suddenly a groundswell of support for fascism but because the material situation has changed dramatically, and a new kind of anti-immigration sentiment – rooted in a public grappling with strained public services and record population growth – has taken its place. Anti-racists do themselves a tremendous disservice if they don’t recognise this fundamental shift.

A different time: The far-right in the 1970s and 1980s

The past offers a useful point of comparison. Sometime in the mid-1980s, a short-lived attempt was made to create a British version of the popular French anti-racist organisation SOS Racisme. One of the group’s few leaflets featured a map of Britain with immigration and emigration figures, revealing that contrary to the claims of fascist groups, the country was not being “flooded” with immigrants. In fact, for nearly 50 years after the end of World War II, many more people were leaving Britain than arriving.

This was a different era, when the anti-immigration call was largely led by fascists with a proven record of Nazism, like John Tyndall. While the National Front and British National Party (BNP) attracted some unwitting supporters who were not hardened racists, their leadership’s anti-immigrant stance came from a different place entirely. Tyndall and his followers believed that non-white immigration to Europe was part of a conspiracy to dilute the white race. This idea was a core tenet laid out in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which explicitly claimed that Jews were responsible for bringing non-white people into the Rhineland with the goal of “ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardisation.”

Anti-fascist organisations like the Anti Nazi League and Anti-Fascist Action countered these groups throughout the 1970s and 80s by exposing their Nazi roots. They used photographs obtained by Searchlight which showed leaders in Nazi uniforms, effectively discrediting them as a genuine political force. When the BNP emerged, similar tactics exposed them as a front for Holocaust deniers and purveyors of antisemitic conspiracy theories. They also directly confronted them in the streets, a tactic reflecting the belief that physical opposition was a necessary part of the struggle against their violent ideology.

When the facts changed

The old anti-racist tactics no longer work because the demographic and material situation in Britain has changed dramatically. The tipping point came in 1994, when for the first time in nearly half a century, immigration figures surpassed emigration. This trend has only accelerated in recent decades.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the latest provisional estimate for the year ending December 2024 puts net migration to the UK at 431,000. This number, while a decrease from the record high of 2023, is the result of 948,000 people migrating into the UK, while 517,000 emigrated. This population surge has left public services struggling after decades of underfunding. The National Health Service, founded in 1948 when the UK’s population was around 50 million, now serves a nation of over 68 million people and is projected by the ONS to surpass 70 million by 2026. This unsustainable growth has placed immense pressure on public institutions, affecting everything from housing and transport to NHS waiting times.

While some argue that the new anti-immigration sentiment is merely a more subtle form of racism, it’s a simplification that misses the crucial shift in public concern. While historical racism hasn’t disappeared, the widespread anxiety stems from tangible issues like the changing nature of work and lack of secure jobs, healthcare wait times and housing shortages rather than pure bigotry.

This fundamental shift means that the political figures who capitalise on anti-immigration sentiment today do not fit the old mould. While Stephen Yaxley Lennon (Tommy Robinson) has a past that includes membership of fascist organisations, his current base of support is a far broader coalition. Likewise, with Nigel Farage and Reform, a significant portion of their support is driven by genuine anxieties about public services and housing, not by racial animus. Ignoring this distinction does a disservice to the anti-racist cause.

Failed government solutions

In response to rising net migration, successive UK governments have implemented various measures to reverse the trend. Following the 2010 election, a Conservative-led government set an ambitious target to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands.” Despite stricter rules on visas, the target was never met. The most dramatic policy change came with Brexit, which officially ended free movement and introduced a new points-based immigration system. In a surprising turn of events, this new system was followed by record-high net migration in 2022-2023, driven by a significant increase in non-EU nationals arriving for work and study.

In response, the government announced a new series of restrictive measures from late 2023 through 2025. These policies, intended to achieve a substantial reduction in immigration, include significantly raising salary thresholds for skilled workers, restricting dependants for students and care workers, and extending the qualifying period for permanent residency.

Beyond the headlines: The truth about immigration

While headlines are often dominated by the issue of Channel crossings and asylum seekers, new data from the Home Office and the House of Commons Library reveals their impact on overall immigration figures remains minimal compared to legal immigration routes. For the year ending March 2025, a total of 109,343 people claimed asylum in the UK. While a significant figure, it is still a small fraction of the 948,000 people who immigrated to the UK in the same period.

Instead, the primary driver of immigration is the recruitment of foreign workers, a practice that has had severe consequences for their home countries. The recruitment of NHS workers from abroad has devastated the health services they were poached from. Countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines have been severely affected, with the Philippines, for example, facing a shortage of 100,000 nurses. This exodus of healthcare professionals from developing nations highlights a clear need for Britain to adopt a more ethical approach to international recruitment.

A new direction for the left

Successful campaign against the far-right in the past involved directly engaging with people’s concerns and winning them away from false solutions. This was the case with the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s when they built a serious street-active movement, up to the BNP in the 1990s, when they had the greatest electoral successes of any fascist party in British history. If anti-racists want to win people over today, they must change tactics. Labelling opponents “fascist” or “racist” is a strategy that no longer resonates with a public grappling with material insecurity. A segment of the left’s preoccupation with the diversion of identity politics and selective internationalism has contributed to this disconnect.

Instead, the focus must be on fighting for alternative government policies that skill Britain’s workforce while simultaneously campaigning against the vilification of genuine asylum seekers. Single-issue anti-racist campaigns cannot make this happen alone; it needs to be part of an entire ideological reorientation of the left. The focus on selective internationalism and identity politics needs to give way to a left that fights for a planned economy and the rebuilding of the NHS, social housing, and the institutions that hold together Britain’s social fabric. This can only happen with extensive government intervention and a far-reaching programme of skilling Britain’s workforce in the areas where it is deficient.

The era for rhetoric is over. Only by fighting – and being seen to be fighting – for a concrete vision of a better Britain can the left once more become the genuine force for progressive change that it once was.

The Irish hip-hop group Kneecap went from having a dedicated cult following to global notoriety after their provocative comments and actions, including their controversial “Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah” chant and the terrorism court case that one of the band members is facing for apparently displaying a Hezbollah flag. This public firestorm has brought them to the attention of many who, like me, may have been previously unfamiliar with their music, but it has also obscured the more profound reasons for their initial rise.

Language and nationalism

So much has been written about Kneecap due to their provocative comments but rather less about what gave them their initial cult following. The Irish language was long suppressed by British rule – Irish still doesn’t have equal status with English in Northern Ireland – and their songs in Gaelige have contributed to a surge in interest in learning the language.

Promotion of the Irish language in the face of the English language that was forced upon them by the Brits is an important component of Irish nationalism. For the huge Irish diaspora in America, Britain, Australia and elsewhere, many times larger than the population of Ireland, the band and everything it stands for is a way to connect with their heritage.

This is where it gets interesting. What ideology saw revival of a language and a connection with its diaspora community essential in breaking the chains of oppression and imperial rule? Kneecap advocates an Irish nationalism that closely resembles the Jewish nationalism – Zionism – that they despise.

Critics of Zionism often argue that it is a unique form of settler-colonialism, a narrative that has resonated with many Irish nationalists. This perspective risks overlooking the deep ideological and historical kinship.

The main difference between Irish republicans attempts to revive their language and that of the Zionists is that the latter started from a lower base but has been significantly more successful. In British Mandate Palestine there were three official languages: English, Arabic and Hebrew. Hebrew had been almost completely lost as a first language until the Zionists revived it. Before that it was the language of the ancient Jewish texts. When Israel was formed two languages were made official, Hebrew and Arabic. When the Brits left they kicked their language out.

Meanwhile, when the Irish Free State was established in 1922 the country theoretically had a stronger starting point with Gaelige, which had never been lost as a first language entirely but was spoken in dwindling numbers. The constitution declared Irish the “national and first official language” of Ireland with English a second official language with the intention of fulfilling the longstanding republican plan of reviving Gaelige as the first language of the Irish people.

Nevertheless, unlike in Israel, – which was established a couple of decades later – Ireland never managed to make the historic language the first language for most people. According to the 2022 Census, there were 71,968 people who reported speaking Irish daily outside of the education system. This represents a little over 1% of the total population of the Republic of Ireland. The language of the imperialist oppressor remains both the language spoken by nearly all Irish people in their daily lives and an official language of the country.

Today, in Israel Hebrew is the native language for more than half of the population with 90% of Israeli Jews and 60% of Israeli Arabs proficient in the language.

Zionism and Irish nationalism

The folk singer Utah Phillips said of America “the long memory is the most radical idea”. Surely that applies universally. For a conveniently and intentionally forgotten history ties Irish and Jewish nationalism together.

The co-founder of the Gaelic League in 1893 was Douglas Hyde whose organisation sought to promote the Irish language as an everyday language as well as preserving folklore, music and traditions. What they were doing was happening at the same time as the early Zionists were trying to revive Hebrew. Hyde was a polyglot who was fluent in Hebrew and believed that the revival of Irish, like Hebrew, was a way to disprove negative stereotypes and prove readiness for self-determination.

The movements also shared inspiration. Irish republican activist Michael Davitt, after witnessing anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia became convinced that Zionism was the “remedy”. Meanwhile Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky studied the guerrilla tactics of the Irish Republican Army who faced the same enemy: the British. The Irgun saw themselves as the “Zionist Sinn Féin.”

Robert Briscoe, an Irish-Jewish republican and a close confidante of the leading Irish nationalist Éamon de Valera (later to become Prime Minister and President of Ireland), acted as a crucial liaison between the two movements. He was both a dedicated Irish nationalist, serving as an IRA gunrunner, and an ardent Zionist.

Avraham Stern, the founder of Lehi translated parts of P.S. O'Hegarty's book, The Victory of Sinn Féin, into Hebrew. Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a prime minister of Israel and was a leader of the Lehi group in the 1940s, which waged opened armed rebellion against the British, adopted the underground name of “Michael” after the IRA’s guerrilla leader Michael Collins.

Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Kneecap's comments serves as a powerful illustration of historical amnesia. The band, in its pursuit of a fiercely independent Irish identity, appears to have forgotten or ignored the historical and ideological parallels that bind their own struggle to that of Zionism.

The revival of the Irish language, a core tenet of their cultural rebellion, is a near-perfect mirror of the Zionist project to revive Hebrew – both born of a need to reclaim identity and resist imperialism. By expressing solidarity with groups hostile to Israel, Kneecap's members are, with stunning irony, celebrating the very forces that would seek to dismantle a nation founded on a similar principle of cultural and linguistic reclamation. Their stance, while politically charged, misses the profound historical kinship between these two national projects, revealing a selective memory that undermines the very coherence of the nationalist ideology they claim to represent.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to engage in political discussion recently – especially on social media – would quickly realise we are not living in the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment's notion of universal truths and rational discourse feels like something from a past world. We are living through a full-scale retreat, driven by a culture that has replaced sober inquiry with emotional virtue signalling, and collective reason with a personalised, algorithmic-fed delusion.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment strove for a better world based on logic and shared humanity. The French Revolution's promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity were a political project. A triumph of this era was the emancipation of the Jews, a radical act of reason against centuries of superstition. The Russian Revolution, at least initially, extended this impulse by granting full rights to the Jewish population. This historical arc now seems to be in reverse. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, we've seen a retreat not just from the Russian Revolution, but also from the French Revolution that inspired it, along with its core philosophical ideas. The hurried, unreflective reunification of Germany, which offered no public reckoning with the reason the country was divided in the first place symbolised this intellectual exhaustion.

Now, we have digital echo chambers where facts are whatever makes you and who you affiliate with feel good. Research has shown that engagement-driven algorithms on social media platforms create echo chambers and “filter bubbles” that amplify users’ existing beliefs and increase political polarisation. The whole idea of objective truth has become a casualty of the content wars.

Conspiracy theories and old hatreds

This culture of unreason is a breeding ground for antisemitism, which in the pyramid of conspiracy theories is the point at the top. The Enlightenment was meant to inoculate us against such irrationality, but the internet has given conspiracy theory fictions a new life. On social media, myths about Jewish power are not just whispered; they’re amplified by algorithm in AI generated videos and viral infographics.

What is a modern crisis is made more complex by a forgotten history: denazification in the West never fully materialised. Many former Nazis were quickly reintegrated, or put to use in the Cold War. Others found refuge in the Middle East, becoming advisors and propagandists for regimes like Egypt and Syria, where they helped spread Nazi-era antisemitism through Arab nationalism.

The Gaza conflict has made this history significant. Anti-Zionism, presented as a legitimate critique, often serves as a Trojan horse for these ancient tropes. It employs selective outrage, holding the Jewish state to a unique moral standard while trafficking in dark fantasies about global Jewish control. This digital amplification makes antisemitism feel like a plausible explanation for a confusing world.

The decay is enabled by a corrosive distrust in institutions – the very things meant to be the guardians of reason. Journalists, scientists, and academics are no longer seen as the experts they usually are but as corrupt members of the “establishment”. This vacuum is a gift to the grifters of the far right and ultra left, who offer simple, emotionally satisfying answers. It's not just a rejection of institutions; it's a rejection of the very idea that some people might know more than you do.

The curse of identity politics

Then there's the political landscape, where Enlightenment ideals have been replaced by the minefield of identity politics and hurt feelings. While the fight for the rights of oppressed minorities have been vital for correcting historical injustices, its modern iteration has become a competition for victimhood in the hierarchy of oppression.

Shared humanity is being traded for fragmented tribalism, where the merits of a policy matter less than which group it is perceived to benefit or harm. In this endless war of feelings, reasoned arguments are not just lost; they are seen as a sign of moral weakness. This has led to a situation where activists become so focused on perceived purity and authenticity that they lose the ability to build broad coalitions. Instead of a unifying political project, the left has fractured into a collection of competing identities and single-issue campaigns, each demanding to be recognised as the most oppressed or worthy. This internal conflict and virtue signalling has become an end in itself, rather than a means to a greater political goal.

This shift has devastated Britain’s left. Once rooted in a universal class analysis – the idea that workers from all lands had a shared interest in opposing capitalism – much of the left has become morally bankrupt. It has abandoned its rational, economic foundation for a fractured, emotional approach. Activists focus on virtue signalling rather than building broad coalitions. The morally compromising alliance between the dominant section of the anti-war left and Islamist movements is a perfect example. The left's obsession with the Gaza conflict is another. It’s not international solidarity; it's selective moral outrage exploited by reactionary actors like Hamas and the Iranian regime.

Immigration and globalisation

The discussion around immigration is another masterclass in this unreason. Instead of data or legal frameworks, the debate is filled with emotional rhetoric, replacing complex discussions with slogans. For the right it is about about “swarms” and “invasions.” The irrationality cuts both ways. The left slogan “refugees welcome here” raised in places where it is patently untrue is cringe-worthy. Calls for open borders are equally detached from the realities of national governance. The notion of open borders is an attack on the nation-state, which was an Enlightenment-era solution for civic life. The nation-state is the only thing that can guarantee the rights of its citizens.

The myth of globalisation has also been completely exposed by recent events, most notably Trump’s tariffs. We were told the world was moving toward a borderless, free-market utopia, but this vision has been contradicted by the new-found protectionism of the strongest power on the planet.

Finally, old frameworks for understanding political evil are unhelpful today. The theory of totalitarianism saw terror enforced by a top-down system of state control. Today’s unreason is a bottom-up chaos, a decentralised decay where millions willingly dissolve the difference between fact and fiction.

Regulation of the internet

There is an ongoing debate about national restrictions on lies and hate on the internet. The lack of regulation of the internet has been driven by the United States which sees “freedom of speech” as sacrosanct and threatens to punish countries that enforce what it sees as punitive legislation.

Meanwhile, in Europe legislation to prevent the regeneration of Nazism and subsequent laws intended to prevent racism have long been in place although very poorly enforced when it comes to the internet. The internet suffered from the globalisation myth with many believing – completely wrongly – that it couldn’t be regulated. In fact, if governments choose to do so they can enforce regulation on internet providers to prevent the spread of hate and damaging lies.

While the Enlightenment championed freedom of expression, it was based on a shared public sphere. The digital world has dismantled that, proving that unregulated speech can be a weapon of mass disinformation. The argument for restrictions is not a rejection of Enlightenment values but a pragmatic recognition that these values must be protected from forces that seek to destroy them from within.

Back to basics

The age of unreason is a crisis of culture and a deep moral sickness. To fight back, the left will have to rediscover its rational core. Its historic strength was in a universal, class-based analysis – a commitment to working people and their allies everywhere. It has lost its way, fracturing into arguments over identity, mistaking moral purity for political power. Reclaiming reason requires a return to this foundation, and trade unions in particular, where workers are organised, have a crucial role to play. It isn’t something that a political party can solve. The fight for reason isn't about winning a culture war; it's about rebuilding the foundations of a civil society. The Enlightenment's project isn't finished. The pieces just need picking up again.