The SLN rejects any attempt to formally or informally stop Marxist analysis and criticism of any bourgeois phenomenon, including Zionism.
We also reject ideologies that collapse the distinction between progressive capitalism and imperialism. The view that Shaftesbury and Salisbury were the originators of Zionism are incomplete as other versions of that theory talk also about Napoleon. Thereby bringing the French Revolution, which actually emancipated the Jews, into the supposed picture of the impulse that created Zionism.
Only when capitalism became imperialist in Lenin’s sense did Zionism and also proto-Hitlerism (racial anti-Semitism) become possible. A key ideological inspirer of attacks on this Marxist view is the Weekly Worker who – as personified by their influential leader Mike McNair – in practice reject the distinction between progressive capitalism and imperialism and support the method of Hal Draper who supported the creation of Israel.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1948/07/israel.htm
We reject their hostility to those such as Chris Williamson, Lowkey and David Miller who defend Iran, Hezbollah and Yemen – the ‘Resistance Axis’ – against imperialism (which includes Israel). Defence of those non-imperialist forces against imperialism is a question of principle for socialists in the tradition of the Anti-Imperialist United Front.
No one denies that Jewish groups have the right to criticise Marxism. Marxists also have the right to point out the anti-Marxist nature of criticism that seeks to brand Marxist analysis of Zionism as ‘anti-Semitism’. Its fundamentally in microcosm the same as Zionist attacks on so-called ‘anti-Semitism’, meaning anti-Zionism (including the IHRA). Like the IHRA it also broadens the definition of anti-Semitism beyond racial antagonism to criticism of their form of identity politics.
The SLN should reject all forms of identity politics in favour of the objective of a revived labour movement acting as a tribune of the oppressed.
