Hey everyone. I just wanted to, like, introduce myself. I popped out of nowhere and started interacting which might’ve been weird. I’m Anna. Im not jewish, but I want to stand up for jewish people - specifically against the hostility they’ve been subjected to in Leftist spaces.

I first started becoming hip to Labour’s AS problem last January, when one of my jewish friends irl sent a screenshot of r*chael sw*nd*n’s “10 demands for BoD” to a group chat and said, “this is antisemitic”.

To my own shame and regret, I never spoke up for jewish people affected by labour’s AS during the GE. I never hounded jewish celebrities and columnists that spoke out about it, never spammed them with “twat twat twat” - but i was silent. And therefore complicit.

It was my privileged position that enabled me to be silent, because antisemitism doesn’t affect me personally, as I am not jewish. I justified it to myself by saying that if a jewish person says they think labour is antisemitic, i will just respect their feelings

and won’t put them down for it. But that wasn’t enough. That’s not active support of jewish people.

So, after seeing that screenshot from my friend, i started thinking. I pulled through my mind accusations of antisemitism against n*v*ra, sw*nd*n etc, and started googling.

Twitter threads and resources by @omgstater summed up perfectly the AS history of those characters. I wasn’t a raging fan of them before due to other controversies, but after reading those threads, i gave them an even wider berth.

Then came the whole row about RLB getting sacked. The next alarm bell was someone promoting the paper The W*rld covering the sacking. The column was authored by w*ll*am*on and accused “the zionist lobby” of being behind the affair.

And something about that really threw me off. It was so... wrong. I asked, “how can you post this? This is wrong, so wrong, using that word like that is so wrong!” But i couldnt put my finger on why.

The next step was at a [non-political] hangout with my russian friends. the conversation touched on the middle east for some reason i can’t remember. I was listening with half an ear until the phrase, “Hamas? the group that wants to kill Jews?”

And i thought to myself, “is it not strange that my apolitical friends know what hamas is about and yet the british left seems to be ignorant, while frequently defending them?”

The bubble burst completely. I started googling all those articles the Hard Left tells you not to read. “Corbyn’s Complaint” etc. I started reading books written about Labour AS, watching videos. Soon, it all became crystal clear to me.

I then started noticing it on reddit. On the hard left subs - and not just graphics that said “zionism is racism/fascism”, but the COMMENTS - oh Heavens, those comments...

So many described Israelis as singularly evil, racist, deplorable. They painted Israeli society as singularly intolerant, wicked. They demonised it because “polls”. Naked racism - left up by moderators while comments defending zionism were deleted and/or authors were abused.

And then it cracked for me completely. Jewish people were concerned by the rhetoric that 1) describes Israel as singularly evil and misrepresents+conflates zionism with fascism, 2) depicts israelis (most of whom are jewish) as evil beyond the pale, and 3) calls for

destruction of Israel which happens to be the world’s only jewish state. It became clear to me how myopic western leftists’ views on israel are. To be able to see israel only through the prism of Izzy-Pal is a sign of privilege. It ignores the fact that Israel is

a symbol of safety and freedom from persecution to the majority of Jews worldwide, as well as their ancestral land. I dont think that a perspective that does not account for that can possibly help anyone in I-P.

I started talking to other people on reddit (shoutout to r/Antisemitisminreddit) and discussing Left Antisemitism. I engaged in discussions with users of that subreddit to see if my understanding of what zionism is, and of why conflating it with fascism etc leads

to antisemitic environments on college campuses and in movements. Jewish people had no obligation to discuss any of that with me, but they did - they helped educate me, and all I got was warmth and encouragement.

Reading up on the SOAS antisemitism case in December, as well as about the antizionist campaign in universities in the 1980s, and watching videos, gave me the idea of doing presentations à-la David Hirsh to my irl left wing friends.

I finally did it last week, and pointed out how the treatment Labour AS whistleblowers received was AS itself, how saying “zionism is racism” leads to antisemitic environments even though “not all jews are zionists etc”, and how its not okay eg when jewish student unions

are prohibited because they are “zionist” while, as we’ve seen in many british unis, genocidal antisemites are free to walk on campus and taunt jewish students. The presentation went well. My friends said they were astonished at the terrible things that get said.

They responded particularly well to me saying that BDS sets an unfair standard for treatment of Israeli academics, and that saying Israel is an ethnostate also sets an unfair standard.

I’d been lurking on twitter for a while without an actual account, but what made me finally join was the spy thing.

I went in there and started telling all the twats that believed someone with a history of AS about what he had to say regarding a jewish person, while jewish AS whitstleblowers were gaslit in leftist spaces and never given the assumption of good faith, to f off. So here i am. Hi.

As a left winger, i really fucking hate and im really ashamed at how our movement has treated jewish people. How it gaslit them and put them down “corb*n wouldnt have caused a holocaust so shut up”, “right wing AS is worse so shut up”.

No one is willing to engage with actual history of our relationship with jewish people and how kich anxiety we’ve caused them in the past. They opted for mythology.

A movement that sells out an ethnoreligious group for a vision of socialism is not a movement i want to participate in - it’s a movement that, as a left winger, i want to challenge and fight against. It’s a movement that deserves to be crushed.