David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) traces the roots of Ken Livingstone's anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism:
Though Britain was not immune to anti-Jewish racism, the ordinary Labour party members were broadly sympathetic to Jews. They saw the children of the camps in Israel seemingly making a new land in Labour’s own image — egalitarian and collective. Significant figures on the Labour left such as Ian Mikardo championed the cause of Israel. With fraternal links to the Israeli Labour party and the Israeli Trade Union, left-wing Zionism became Labour’s default position.
Not everyone on the left agreed. By the early 1950s, Stalin was convinced that “cosmopolitan” Jews in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were hijacking communism. In the show-trials that disfigured the Iron Curtain countries, “Zionism” became one of the charges that could result in a noose or a bullet in the nape of the neck. Often the accusations linked Zionists not only to western intelligence but also to the defeated Nazis.
There was one significant taker for this proposition after Stalin’s demise: a Trotskyist fringe group expelled from Labour that became the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers’ Revolutionary party (the cult to which Vanessa Redgrave belonged). The WRP sought finances for its activities from radical Arab regimes, including that of Muammar Gaddafi. In return it championed the most anti-Israel stance. For the WRP the issue was not some illusory peace in the Middle East but the requirement for Israel to be destroyed altogether.
A particular strand of argument that the party began to use was that Zionism was, paradoxically, associated with Nazism. They were to be understood as complementary in that one wanted the Jew out and the other was the Jew who wanted to be out. And both were therefore equally illegitimate. This idea of Nazi-Zionist collusion was the message of the infamous — and unperformed — 1987 playPerdition by the former Socialist Labour League (SLL) member Jim Allen (to be directed by Ken Loach). It was also the substance of what Ken Livingstone said this week. In the late Seventies, Mr Livingstone’s Labour soul-mate was “Red” Ted Knight, who had been a member of the SLL and was still in touch with his old comrades. Together they produced and edited the Labour Herald, a far-left publication published at a loss by the WRP’s printing press.
At the same time as that paper was damning Zionism in most editions, the WRP was getting hundreds of thousands of pounds from Arab regimes. In 1983 Mr Livingstone wrote an article in the WRP’s Newsline paper to attack an edition of the BBC’s Money Programme that had revealed some ugly truths about the WRP’s print business.
Mr Livingstone wrote: “It is obvious that those who inspired theMoney Programme want to silence you. There is certainly a case for suspecting the hand of the forces opposed to the Palestinians. The fact that smears about me are being fed to the Jewish Chronicle on a fairly regular basis suggests that agents of the Begin [Israeli] government are active in the British labour movement and press at present.”...
Labour’s position, like that of the British Communist party, was that the solution was a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But on Labour’s far left that was not the view. A veteran anti-Zionist, Tony Greenstein, recalled this month in a Trotskyist publication that he “first met Jeremy Corbyn over 30 years ago when I chaired the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine. The policy of the campaign, which Jeremy Corbyn sponsored, was to support a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine. We did not support the ‘right to exist’ of the apartheid state of Israel.”
Now Corbyn's in charge of the Labour Party, that position - that Israel has no right to exist - is effectively what many top Labour figures believe. Seumas Milne, Corbyn's director of strategy and communications, is on record as stating that the foundation of the state of Israel was "a crime":
In the footage, uncovered by the Guido Fawkes website [link added - MH], Mr Milne can be seen speaking at a rally in 2009. He says: “Hamas [the Palestinian militant group] is not broken and will not be broken because of the spirit of resistance of the Palestinian people. We have a responsibility more than anyone to show solidarity in a practical way because it was in this country that this crime began 90 years ago when Palestine was promised by the British government who had no right to offer it to another people.”
Corbyn, of course, can't openly admit to this now. But these are the circles he moves in, and from which he's emerged. Livingstone has no such scruples. He's fighting back:
Ken Livingstone has said he will use a 1983 book by an American Marxist to defend himself against accusations of antisemitism and bringing the Labour party into disrepute....
Speaking to the Guardian on Friday, Livingstone praised Lenni Brenner, the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, and said the book was full of details that he would cite in his defence.
“All the detail is in there. The striking thing that does confirm there was an ongoing dialogue between the Zionists and Nazi government is, in 1935 Hitler passed a law banning any flag being displayed except the swastika and the blue and white Zionist flag, which is pretty amazing.”...
Thomas Weber, a professor of history and international affairs and an expert on the Hitler era, Jewish relations and German history, said he was not immediately familiar with Brenner’s book.
However, he added: “Brenner’s book lies well outside academic mainstream. It is mostly celebrated either by the extreme left and by the neo-Nazi right.”
Brenner’s book is cited by, among others, the Institute for Historical Review, which is widely regarded as antisemitic and is listed by the US Southern Poverty Law Center as a group that has engaged in Holocaust denial....
A 1983 review by CC Aronsfeld, a respected scholar of the Holocaust, in the journal International Affairs was critical of Brenner’s book.
“Brenner has produced a party political tract that unhinges the balance of history by ignoring too many difficulties, especially psychological. For once Stalinists will be pleased with the work of a Trotskyist,” he concluded.
For more on Brenner, see Paul Bogdanor at Harry's Place.