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by Hilary Aked
JULY 1, 2016
The left should “stop talking about Zionism”, Labour’s Jon Lansman argued recently in the wake of a row that engulfed the party over anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and led to the Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry. The inquiry, which was released yesterday, suggests a better way forward.
Chakrabarti, who disclosed that she had joined the Labour party on the same day she was asked to head up the investigation, found no evidence of institutional anti-Semitism within Labour. As regards Zionism, she advised “critics of the Israeli State and/or Government” to use the term ‘Zionist’ “carefully and never euphemistically or as part of personal abuse”. This is very good advice. Conversations about Zionism – carried out both by supporters and critics – are often crass, sometimes abusive, and occasionally accompanied by anti-Semitic or Islamophobic comments, particularly some of those carried out on Twitter IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
However, it’s important we don’t allow discussions around Zionism, an ideology and political movement which remains at the heart of the Israel/Palestine conflict, to be shut down. Indeed, this is precisely the point Chakrabarti made. Being respectful – and, as she put it, “leaving Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust out of it” – should help to “facilitate” rather than inhibit debate about what she called “one of the most intractable and far-reaching geopolitical problems of the post-war world”. In fact, she encouraged Labour members “to criticise injustice and abuse wherever they find it, including in the Middle East.”
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