Read on Twitter
Why do they? I know a lot of this will be obvious, but I'm going to try to answer it anyway. One issue is that people on this strand of the left aren't setting out to be antisemitic, and believe themselves to be antiracists. Long-Bailey might well be feeling confused right now. https://twitter.com/SalomonSoup/status/1276442838763520000
I mean, all she did was retweet an interview with a well-known actress, who is left-wing and supports her faction of the party, that was published on a left-leaning publication. As Owen Jones put it:
Peake claimed something that wasn't strictly true, but why the big deal? Why sacked for that? And why did she single out Israel? I think a lot of it has to do with a kind of narcissistic masochism that we can all fall into. When you're very young, history seems simple.
The Second World War, for instance, was a fight between Good and Evil, Us and Them. When you get a bit older, you can see it's more complicated, eg the Soviet Union was allied with the Nazis (Them), then with Us, then Them again. Confusing! And after 1945? Harder still.
The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state and we were the good guys - easy. Then you're in your teens and read about Vietnam, Agent Orange, see the photo of the terrified naked girl running. And you wonder:
After that, even more confusing. 9/11 is followed by widespread bigotry against Muslims. So you're someone who wants to be tolerant and decent and not discriminate. Perhaps you go on marches, meet in halls. You learn about Palestine. A minority. Brown. Oppressed.
And you are white. Part of the majority. Part of the oppressors. This is where the world view of people like Jeremy Corbyn and Seamus Milne springs from. They are not all that interested in human rights abuses by, say, Russia - they don't assuage *their feelings of guilt*.
Because they don't want to be the baddies. Ditto abuses in Qatar or Iran or other countries. Corbyn never went on rallies to support protest movements against dictators unless he could find a way that those dictators represented the West - ie him.
So in this way Israel has become an avatar for masochistic feelings by privileged white Westerners. A way to show solidarity with a minority, brown-skinned, oppressed by a state Britain had a role in setting up and that the West supports. The murder of journalists and dissidents
and gay people and trans people in anti-Western states are largely ignored by such people. Because it doesn't assuage their own discomfort at 'realising' from a young age that they might be 'the baddies'. Most people come to realise it means the world is more complicated.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Oh, sorry, I realised I had another point to make! Long-Bailey sharing the article in The Independent of all places. Yes, it's a problem because the result of all of the above is not actors sieg-heiling in the streets, but giving interviews to mainstram publications in which
the blame for police brutality against black people in the United States is suggested to be Israel's and nobody else's, and that a shadow cabinet minister doesn't see the problem and many don't when she is sacked. The obsession becomes normalised as part of discourse.
A clearly antisemitic mural - can't see it. A man claiming the blood libel - invite him to parliament. Laying a wreath with terrorists for terrorists - can't see it. It's an insidious process, and it has taken over a whole political party in a few years.
