July 2, 2021 - 11:15am
There were three main issues on the doorstep during the by-election in Batley and Spen: police, potholes, and Palestine. A new police station can be built. Potholes can be fixed. But for Labour, even after narrowly winning the seat, Palestine won’t go away.
Last Saturday a senior Labour official told the Mail on Sunday that the party was “hemorrhaging votes” among Muslims in the constituency. Reports in the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News were jammed with vox pops that explained why.
Residents told the JC that “the Zionist lobby” was why they turned their backs on Labour. In Batley, the seat’s largest town, Jewish News found that “the number one issue at stake for the vast majority is that of Palestine”. Voters of South Asian origin make up around 20% of the electorate in the constituency, and 19% of them are Muslim. The party lost their vote in this by-election.
The campaign was marred by dirty tricks, depressing leaflets, abuse, acrimony, more dirty tricks, viral videos, eggings, and George Galloway. He is alleged to have stirred up trouble for Labour with Muslim voters on three fronts — LGBT education in schools, Kim Leadbeater’s position on Israel, and by planting a theory that Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox was assassinated by the British state due to her support for Palestine.
Galloway is by far the creepiest political figure in Britain today, though it didn’t stop his ‘Workers Party’ taking 21.9% of the vote.
But Galloway did not place the issue of Palestine in these voters’ minds. Anyone who’s spent any time around the British Left, talking to activists, or watching demos, knows the outsized importance of Palestine in the movement’s imagination. As with the bitter fight around Cecil Rhodes’ statue above Oxford’s High Street, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is one where there is feeling that Britain has a unique responsibility to redress the wrongs of the past. This is when you hear the words “Balfour Declaration.”
Arthur James Balfour — variously a High Tory Secretary of State for Ireland, the Leader of the House of Commons, and Prime Minister — is only remembered today in the context of the declaration he made as Foreign Secretary in 1917, in support of a “national home” for the Jewish people in the Holy land.
He was much more than this declaration. A philosopher and high society ornament, Balfour was enigmatic, indecisive, charming, and always yawning. D.H. Lawrence referred to him as an “old poodle.” “If you wanted nothing done,” Winston Churchill wrote, “AJB was your man.” Contemporaries thought him a verbal sorcerer, which is why they kept bringing him back into government.
Balfour watched life from the cold perspective of a satellite orbiting a planet. He was a politician who hated politics. And as an Edwardian aristocrat, it’s fair to say that Balfour’s sympathies to other human beings were impaired. He was anti-Semitic too — an anti-Semitic Zionist. His attitudes towards Zionism were like his attitudes towards everything else: complex and ambivalent.
Read the declaration again: the document that launched a hundred conspiracy theories, ancestors of those circulating through Batley and Spen today. It is a classic Balfourian hedge. What exactly is a “national home”? Is it a nation state? Is it Israel? Nobody at the time knew. Balfour certainly didn’t. He later said that the Arabs would not begrudge the Jews a “small notch” from their territories. Not his best prophecy.
Nor could he have predicted that over a hundred years after his declaration, in an old English mill town, it would be helping to undermine the Labour party’s electoral coalition. (“What exactly is a trade union?” Balfour asked a socialist once.)
George Galloway blazed away in this election with weapons that Balfour built. No British government is going to “solve” the conflict in Gaza — but as a wedge issue, it is perfectly engineered to create conflicts in the Labour Party. That this was, ultimately, the work of a lackadaisical aristocrat — the last High Tory ever to rule in Britain — is a dark irony.
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This farcical feud just heightens the accurate and I think widely held sense that the left is completely detached from the rest of us.
The likely view of everyone else is that Britain should have no view on Palestine, if it’s a big deal it’s only because Labour let in too many Muslims, it doesn’t excuse the left’s anti-semitism, we don’t care about Kashmir either, and if you do, you’re in the wrong country so please clear off to the right one.
That this is even a discussion point proves that the left is unfit to govern and always has been. It’s a fault line wholly within and wholly created by previous leftism and I am incensed that British hustings feature the irrelevant and thoroughly nasty preoccupations of revolting bigots.
“An anti-Semitic Zionist” seems like a contradiction in terms, but it becomes much easier to understand when you remember that both Zionists and anti-Semites share the same aim — the removal of Jews from non-Jewish society. The issue is clouded these days by the “tick box” mentality of the left as they smear anyone even centrist and moderate in their politics. Are you right wing? Then you’re ; Racist – check. Greedy – check. “Wrong side of history” – check. And, of course, anti-Semite – check.
Semite, member of a people speaking any of a group of related languages presumably derived from a common language, Semitic (see Semitic languages). The term came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians, and Aramaean tribes. Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa have all been proposed as possible sites for the prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples, but no location has been definitively established.
So an anti-semite doesn’t like Arabs either. Curious
Mr Lloyd mistakes rallying cries for motivation. Palestine is just one of many ’causes’ contrived to give Islam an excuse for ‘defensive’ war. It is, of course, by far the most important, because of the involvement of the Jews, Islam’s primary ideological enemy. But if the Palestine question didn’t exist, there would be no shortage of other rallying cries, because the underlying motivation is intrinsic to the religion.
Ironically, one of his quotes that stuck with me is “Nothing matters much, and few things matter at all.” Palestine must be one of those Few Things.
I dont think Balfour offered a national home in the Ottoman Empire in 1917, in World War 1, through absent mindedness. After all, he would have expected it to upset the Arabs, who, disunited as they were, might well have wanted to keep all of Palestine. Maybe he decided they were not a factor on the war. Maybe he thought that a Jewish national home would be a thorn in the side of the Ottoman Empire. It would be interesting to know more.