On initiative of USFI hack, ALDA and Members Charter effectively proscribe Consistent Democrats and Liaison Committee for the Fourth International
By Ian Donovan
On 25th May 2026, the Assembly Organising Committee (AOC) of the Your Party All-London District Assembly (ALDA) took the decision to violate its own proclaimed purpose of building a ‘party of the whole left’, and its previously expressed opposition to bans and proscriptions on the left, by banning me, a thrice-elected delegate from the Croydon branch of Your Party, from the ALDA discussion group, and from all the ALDA WhatsApp groups. The representative of the AOC wrote:
“After discussion amongst the Assembly Organising Committee, we are removing you from the ALDA WhatsApp community.
We believe that whatever your intentions, opinions or feelings, your repeated claim that Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in the ruling class is by definition antisemitic. We cannot tolerate racism in our online community.
To clarify, the AOC does not have the remit to prevent Croydon from electing you as a delegate, but currently our remit does extend to monitoring and making decisions regarding the WhatsApp community.”
I initially responded thus:
“Your position is a disgrace. I have screenshots of the entire discussion, which clearly reveals that I was subjected to Stalinist-style abuse and cop-baiting. I also have the testimony of Alex Green in that regard. I have screenshotted it all.
My position is entirely fact- based and I was also Nazi-baited by Simon Hannah simply for correcting a factual error about the ethnic origin of a Zionist oligarch – Zuckerberg – who is deeply involved in persecution of Palestinian activists online.
Pointing out the ethnic politics of a class enemy is in no way racist and your position, that such a person should be immune from criticism of his ethnic politics and bigotry BECAUSE of his ethnic origin, it itself racist.
Far from removing racism from this discussion, you have, in fact, institutionalised Jewish chauvinism and thereby anti-Palestinian racism in ALDA.
I will be taking legal advice about this, as the association of my views with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which I am on record as condemning as a ‘warrant for genocide’, is defamatory. I can provide chapter and verse in this going back many years. The Protocols is a document that posits the idea of a cross-class conspiracy of all Jews to enslave all of non-Jewish humanity. It is obvious to anyone with a basic familiarity with Marxism that what I am pointing out with my position on Zionism is a class-based form of ethnic-nationalist politics furthering the victimisation of an oppressed people – the Palestinians. If you cannot see the difference, this is prejudice coming from you.
The equation of the two is racist ON YOUR PART. The distinction is elementary for a Marxist. I have clearly been libelled in this discussion by Simon Hannah, and I will be exploring the possibility of legal action against him for defamation.
You should also know that I consider that Zarah Sultana was mistaken for withdrawing her threat to sue those who smeared her last September for defamation. She should have sued Corbyn and his cohorts for libel. We should not tolerate libel in our movement.”
A few days later, on 30th May, I was banned from attending the Members Charter conference. I was one of the earliest signatories of this initiative, I was number 6 on the list, and one of the volunteers who pledged to help build it in the run up to the full conference in September. I was removed simply for my views, not for any misconduct, without any hearing of any type, as I pressed the obviously-embarrassed comrade S, one of the initiators of the Members Charter. When pushed he said there would have to be a full hearing and indeed debate on these questions after the conference. Which serious supporters of a democratic socialist party project should hold them to. Their ground for excluding me was supposedly my ‘anti-Semitism’ for noting facts that even those condemning these views had to accept were factually correct. But before going on to that, it is necessary to examine what Hannah represents politically vis-à-vis my own views and positions.
Examination of the WhatsApp discussion reproduced below shows clearly that the political positions being argued by me in this discussion are the politics of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, agreed internationally in a draft programme produced by comrades in Britain and South America in 2021. The LCFI is a strongly anti-imperialist, communist tendency that is militantly for the defence of Russia and China against the current imperialist Cold War. We still consider China to be a deformed workers state, albeit with significant differences from earlier manifestations of that phenomenon, more resembling the programme of Bukharin than Stalin since 1979. We consider Russia to be a relatively new phenomenon: a weak form of capitalism that would be dependent/semi colonial were it not for major deformations on it derived from 74 years of existence as a post-capitalist workers state, bureaucratically deformed for most of that period up to 1991, when the workers state collapsed.
We consider Russia to be a new variant of what Trotsky in an earlier context called combined and uneven development – the interpenetration of different modes of production to produce a distinctive social formation. Putin’s Russia is the dialectical opposite of Tsarist Russia, which combined feudal despotism with a stunted form of capitalism largely imported by the Tsarist state. A bourgeois state like Russia today with ‘socialist’ deformations is a manifestation of the fact that the counterrevolution that took place in the USSR in 1991 was not fully consummated. In the Yeltsin period of neo-liberal shock treatment in the 1990s, several million former Soviet workers died from malnutrition, suicidal despair and deprivation of healthcare (and life expectancy fell by 5 years).
At the end of the 1990s Yeltsin was forced out by a popular backlash that the apparatus of the former workers state was able to put itself at the head of. That apparatus had remained substantially intact, and as the remnants of a Stalinist labour bureaucracy, it still had sufficient links with the masses to allow them to force a partial retreat from capitalist restoration. That is the root of Putin’s administration and also of its unprecedented popularity among the Russian masses. Under Putin, the terrible attacks of neoliberalism have been substantially reversed and Russian life expectancy has been more than restored to its levels before the neoliberal shock. And this new kind of deformed non-imperialist semi-capitalism is a natural ally of China’s Bukharinised deformed workers state, and between them and their Iranian ally they are now in the process of delivering the greatest defeat to US imperialism (and its smaller ‘Siamese twin’ Zionist Israel) in its history.
My main antagonist in the dispute was Simon Hannah, who is a prominent supporter of ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’, now the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI). The main reason for this digression about Russia and China is to underline the difference between our politics and those of Hannah, the USFI, and the ACR. This organisation has a many decades-long history of betrayals and is among those who have brought the worst discredit on the name of Trotskyism, associating it around the world with support for NATO and its imperialist proxy wars. Particularly its support for the proxy war in Ukraine, its support for US imperialist aggression (in part on Israel’s behalf) in the Middle East (directly in Libya, by proxy in Syria). Then there is its virulent Russophobia and Sinophobia, branding Russia and China as ‘imperialist powers’, and equivalent enemies of the world working class to US imperialism, NATO, and Israel. This people are effectively a pro-NATO fifth column in Your Party, and in the Grassroots Left in particular.
USFI: Pro-NATO Russophobes, Sinophobes and Crypto-Zionists
Hannah’s and the USFI’s arch Russophobic and Sinophobic views are summed in an article by him: “Revolutionary Defeatism: Today and Yesterday” from April 2025, where he characterises Russia and China as “imperialist powers” and says:
“The essential disagreement is over the degree to which Ukraine has a right to defend itself from an invasion by an imperialist power. Some on the “Left” are cheerleading Russia and believe this is a war waged by Russia to denazify Ukraine. I won’t deal with that argument because it is so obviously ridiculous.” (https://anticapitalistresistance.org/revolutionary-defeatism-yesterday-and-today/)
ACR support NATO’s losing Nazi-conducted proxy war in Ukraine, initially targeted against the Russian-speaking people of the South-East half of Ukraine, particularly the Donbass but really encompassing the region (roughly) South East of a line drawn between Odessa and Kharkov, which involved the persecution of those Russian populations. This was engineered by the US and NATO with the NED-funded Maidan coup in 2014, that overthrew the elected president of Ukraine, abolished constitutional language equality and engaged in systematic repression against Russian speakers, with similar aspirations as Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Zelensky himself has said that he wants Ukraine to become a ‘Big Israel’; he made that clear with his ‘solidarity’ with the Zionists’ Gaza genocidal operation since October 2023. This repression of Russian speakers was always intended to provoke a NATO proxy war with Russia itself. Hannah clearly supports that repression, which has been carried out by Nazi militia such as the Azov, Aidan, Kraken Brigades etc which are a major part of Ukraine’s forces. His screed does not even mention the rights of this Russian-speaking population to exist, let alone to speak their language and self-determine, from which it is reasonable to conclude that he does not consider they have any such rights.
He goes on to attack those leftists who are neutral in NATO wars from Serbia in the 1990s to Syria today from a pro-NATO standpoint, saying
“Again, who provides weapons to a national liberation movement or a country resisting imperialist invasion is a secondary question to the fact of the legitimate struggle itself. It was right for the Kosovars to get weapons from the West in the 1990s. It was right for the Syrian resistance and the Kurds to get weapons during the Syrian revolution. Do these weapons come with strings attached? Sometimes, we cannot ignore the autonomy of people fighting a legitimate struggle for freedom because of imperialist machinations.” (ibid)
This is a manifesto of NATO ‘socialism’. Every one of these ‘struggles’ involved imperialist crimes against the peoples targeted: the large-scale NATO use of Depleted Uranian weapons against Serbia in 1999 was a crime similar to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. For all the NATO propaganda about Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the main victims have been the Serb population there. As for Syria, ACR are supporters of the supposed ‘Syrian Revolution’ after the first naïve flush of the Arab Spring in 2011 after which it was co-opted by NATO and Zionism. In early 2025 this ‘revolution’ brought to power Ahmad Al Shara’a (aka “Julani”), who was one of the founders of ISIS in Syria, then moving through an array of al Qaeda-related splinter groups to become the thinly disguised communal terrorist group HTS, which now holds power and foments pogroms against minorities all over Syria, with the approval of Trump, Starmer and Netanyahu. These reactionary jihadists were just mercenaries for the US, Israel and other stooges such as Saudi Arabia – there was no democratic content to their war for the West. Such a wonderful ‘revolutionary outcome’!
Then there is his brazen defence of the USFI’s support for the imperialist invasion of Libya in 2011:
“Sensing an opportunity to overthrow a regime that had often been a thorn in the side of the West, NATO intervened in support of the uprising, providing air support to prevent their total annihilation by Gaddafi’s forces. This wasn’t a celebration of popular revolt by Western imperialism, but a pragmatic calculation that overthrowing Gaddafi was in the interests of the Western imperialists. It was also in the interests of Libyans as well, of course.” (ibid)
This NATO supporter has no more respect for the rights of Libyans than he does for Donbass people or Syrians. Despite the many despotic flaws of Gaddafi, his regime used oil revenues to create the most developed social welfare system in Africa by far, including such things as free electricity, interest-free loans, housing for all, free education – which actually led to a massive rise in literary rates in a formerly illiterate country during his rule. And much more. (See https://globhistory.org/en/article/liviya/socialnye_reformy_livii) These social gains were blown away by the imperialist invasion; after that Gaddafi’s Islamic left populism was replaced by a total collapse into warlordism, and even slave markets for black Africans. Far from being in the ‘interests of Libyans’, the imperialist invasion was a pestilence on Libya. One can only think that someone who cheers for such things, as well as Nazi terror in the Donbass, and the rise of the pogromist Al Shara’a to power in Syria, has a truly foul contempt for those peoples outside of the imperialist West who dare to stand up to NATO and their frequent partners in crime, the Zionist rulers of Israel.
So back to the Hannah-led witchhunt in ALDA’s discussion list. The discussion was on the material base of Zionism in the imperialist countries, and the views of the LCFI, which I have been a supporter of since 2015, are laid out on in the draft programme that the LCFI’s international leadership agreed in 2021, including the following passage on Zionism:
“One other crucial post World War II development is the creation of Israel, a new transplanted imperialist formation in the Middle East, that expropriated the Palestinian Arab people of their homeland and through mass expulsion and sporadic massacres, turned around three quarters of them into stateless refugees. The reactionary role of Zionism today is completely at odds with the progressive, vanguard role that Jewish intellectuals and militants played in revolutionary and democratic movements against feudalism in Europe, and in the early socialist and communist movements, which was itself a product of the universal ethos of the Jews as a qualitatively more internationalised population than any of their contemporaries in the period of bourgeois revolutions and the early period of the workers movement. This progressive history was negated by the extermination of many of the progressive, anti-Zionist and revolutionary Jews by Nazi anti-Semitism in WWII, which allowed Zionism, as a reactionary, imperialist solution to the historical oppression of the Jews, to become dominant. The Palestinian Arab question is one of the most explosive and crucial national questions on the planet. The slow-motion Zionist genocide of the Palestinians, which could easily escalate, is symbolised by the repeated butchery of the people of Gaza and the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Paradoxically, this has much in common with the persecution of the Jews by anti-Semites in Europe that the Zionists exploited and made use of many desperate European Jews as cannon fodder for their racist colonial endeavour at the time of Israel’s foundation. The demand for the full right to return of the Palestinian Arabs and the replacement of Israel with a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine ruled by the Arab majority is a basic democratic demand and the concrete expression of the Permanent Revolution. It can only be achieved with the revolutionary aid of the Arab, Persian, Turkish and other working classes of the whole Middle Eastern region.
“Israel has a unique relationship with the traditional imperialist powers particularly in North America and Europe, by virtue of the Jewish-Zionist caste within the bourgeoisies of those countries. The overrepresentation of Jews among the bourgeoisie in the diaspora imperialist countries, a product of their long pre-capitalist role as a commodity- and money-trading people-class under the natural, non-commodity based economy of feudalism, gave birth through a convulsive and contradictory process in the 20th Century, to powerful Zionist factions of the imperialist bourgeoisie in those countries that regard Israel as their own imperialist state, just as much as the state of the countries in which they reside. This is a unique, though fragile and unwieldy, imperialist formation that gives Israel much more clout than its size and population relative to its imperialist allies, such as the US, would seem to indicate. This has produced an additional complexity in the politics of the Middle East, and because of its relationships with imperialism in general, to the struggle against imperialism itself. This has particularly become important since the collapse of Stalinism, though perhaps its importance was not fully appreciated prior to that.
“Zionism also has played a deeply reactionary role in attacking the workers movement in the old imperialist countries. A case in point is the Zionist-led campaign in Britain to bring down the left Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn between 2015 and 2019 with a massive McCarthy style media-based witchhunt based on phoney accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’, which the weak Corbyn leadership capitulated to. It is a matter of basic self-defence of the workers movement that Marxists should fight for the exclusion of supporters of political Zionism from all working-class organisations. The labour movement should be educated to regard political Zionists as fundamentally similar to Neo-Nazis.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/lcfi-draft-programme/)
It is clear that the views I am being banned from ALDA for upholding are the views of the LCFI. So, this decision is itself a violation of the proclaimed aims of ALDA to further Zarah Sultana’s aspiration for a ‘party of the whole left’. It is also a violation of the basic democratic right of freedom of criticism about matter of politics. The views argued in the discussion by me are clearly identical politically to the views of the LCFI, which is not surprising as I have been an active supporter of the LCFI since 2015, i.e., for 11 years.
“Representation” and racist oppression
Claiming that to discuss issues of the ratios and percentages of representation of different ethnic groups in capitalist ruling classes is ‘racism’ is unsustainable and basically an attack on any attempt to apply historical materialism to questions of privilege and underprivilege, i.e., to racist oppression. It is an anti-communist attack on historical materialism, not any sort of racism.
Before moving on to the issue of ‘overrepresentation’, it is worth looking at a symmetrically opposite case – the underrepresentation of US blacks in the ruling class of the United States. This is a classic sign of the fact that this population is oppressed, and excluded from the benefits of the society they inhabit. US blacks are approximately 14% of the US population. In 2025 there were 14 US black billionaires, out of 902, approximately 1.5%. That out of a black population that makes up 14% of the total US population. But among those billionaires, seven of them are entertainments or sports performers, and are certainly not among the commanders of the US economy therefore. Such entertainers are very minor among the bourgeoisie – they are not owners of substantial capital – their income derives from performance revenue, not surplus value. With half of them being in his category, it is fitting to say that the real representation of the US Black population in the ruling class is just under 0.8%. They certainly do not intrude into the domain of the real, dominant forces in US capitalism. So black people are underrepresented by a factor of more than 15 in the US ruling class.
Similar things are true elsewhere but the US case is simpler to investigate because there is no complicating question of immigration involved with US blacks, whose existence in the US is as long standing as the white population. This signifies that black Americans are an oppressed population that is at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that is characteristic of imperialist capitalism in the US at least. It is also clear that the question of representation in the ruling class is intimately linked to questions involving ethnic/racial inequality in such societies. Seeking to forbid discussion of this is seeking to forbid discussion of oppression vs. privilege, which is itself racist.
Zionist Jews are represented among the wealthiest layers of the ruling classes in the West far beyond the numbers of Jews in the general population. The classic example of this is that while Jewish people generally are approximately 2% of the US population, when it comes to the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States, 6 of them are Jewish, and since Zionism is the hegemonic ideology among bourgeois Jews, evidently Zionists.
Non-Zionist Jewish super-rich bourgeois today are rare. One well-known example, George Soros, has himself been subjected to genuinely anti-Semitic abuse from Zionists and their allies, notably including the pro-Zionist former Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and also Yair Netanyahu, son of the genocidaire Israeli leader. Orban’s regime accommodated Binyamin Netanyahu in Budapest in April 2025 in defiance of the ICC’s arrest warrant for war crimes/crimes against humanity – i.e., for the genocide. Not that Soros is any kind of beacon of enlightenment – he acts as an agent of US imperialism as he showed in the Maidan colour revolution in Ukraine in 2014. But genuinely anti-Semitic abuse against him should be condemned on principle.
“Anti-Semitic Tropes” and Zionist Tropes
An indicative episode about the political errors that can result from misrepresentation of this critique of Zionism is that in my discussion with comrade S, from the Members Charter, he recounted the following. Another founder of the Members Charter, a Jewish comrade who I have known for many years, with a gap in relations when he gained the erroneous view that I held some kind of racist hostility to Jews, recently said that he now considered that I have no hostile attitude to Jews, but that I had a political problem with ‘tropes’. This echoes the remark made by Tony Greenstein earlier that my positions meant I was “politically, not personally, anti-Semitic”. This is a contradiction in terms – racism is as racism does – it is not possible to be both non-racist personally and yet have racist politics. Non-racist views defeat such racist conceptions.
The error in this conception on the part of our critics flows from a degree of political softness on Zionism on the left more generally, that exists in many cases below the conscious threshold, and flows from a degree of cross-class liberal sentiment, some of it liberal-Zionist in origin, which literally is living in the past, in a bygone era. It’s simply a Zionist-trained Pavlovian reaction, at odds with current social and economic realities, to associate a critique of the cross-frontier activities of Israel-supporting bourgeois with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The difference is pretty basic as explained earlier:
“The Protocols is a document that posits the idea of a cross-class conspiracy of all Jews to enslave all of non-Jewish humanity. It is obvious to anyone with a basic familiarity with Marxism that what I am pointing [to] … is a class-based form of ethnic-nationalist politics furthering the victimisation of an oppressed people – the Palestinians.”
The facile, shallow equation of the world of the Protocols, with that of the Israel lobby today, ignores the major change in the world since the creation of the Zionist state. It also ignores the real nature of Zionist strategy. Many leftists will say that Zionism’s strategy is ‘reactionary’, but don’t really draw out the full conclusion or elaborate on that. But Zionist strategy was always, in a world divided between imperialist oppressor states and the many oppressed nations and peoples who are their victims, to move Jews as a population from the ranks of the oppressed, into the ranks of the dominant, oppressor peoples. This was possible only because, unlike other oppressed peoples, the Jews’ oppression had a pre-capitalist source/origin, and was not organic to capitalism. That was achieved with the creation of Israel, and consolidated with the 1967 war. With that consolidation, Zionism became the dominant form of politics among bourgeois Jews, and as with most peoples, the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie becomes hegemonic among the non-bourgeois population of the group concerned. Dissent from that becomes a revolutionary act.
Anti-Semitism, like every form of racism, involves hostility to the targeted population as a whole. It does not discriminate along class lines. Class politics is the opposite of that. But the notion of ‘tropes’ is an attempt to mystify that – and its source is Zionist. The Protocols is racist because it portrays all Jews of all classes as monsters out to enslave humanity. But the purpose of the ‘tropes’ mystification is not to criminalise that racism, but to criminalise criticism of the bourgeoisie of an oppressor people. The ultimate instance of such a sinister mystification is the 10th “example” of antisemitic ‘tropes’ in the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism, which says that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” is supposedly anti-Semitic. Of course, what the Nazis are known for above all its genocide. And so, we see the logic of this mystification when it is now openly being said that accusing Israel of genocide is “anti-Semitic”, based on this notion of ‘tropes’.
This lie, which demands that people deny the voluminous evidence of Israeli genocide in order to avoid this supposed anti-Semitic “trope”, can justly be called both a mystification and a Zionist trope. That same is true of Simon Hannah’s allegation that the LCFI’s understanding of the (factually proven) social power and organised international collaboration of super-rich Jewish-Zionist bourgeois, that they constitute a caste that organises the oppression of Palestinians in several imperialist states, is the same as the Protocols. That notion is likewise a Zionist trope, that attempts to exploit the oppression of Jews in the past to justify or at least cover up the oppression of Palestinians today by the Zionist mainstream of Jewish bourgeois politics. Unfortunately, much of the social democratic left unthinkingly parrot this thinking. But people like Simon Hannah who consciously use this Zionist trope to protect this bourgeois layer from Marxist criticism act as anti-communist witchhunters and agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement.
The main perpetrators of genuinely anti-Semitic abuse today are the pro-Zionist media, for instance the Daily Mail, Times, Daily Telegraph and Sun all ran outrageous racial caricatures of the Green Party leader Zack Polanski with an enlarged nose, a classic Nazi racist propaganda theme, during the recent local elections. A minority of the far right still clings to Hitler’s Jew-hatred but the majority embrace Israel as a more successful example of a racist ethnocracy than the Third Reich itself. These racist caricatures are the residue of an earlier period in the history of capitalism where the tendency of Jews to become disproportionately successful in ‘business’, was regarded with suspicion by much of the non-Jewish imperialist ruling class, because Jews, as an often-oppressed group at that time, were often involved with left-wing politics, democracy and even Communism. The Jewish bourgeoisie came under suspicion of being subversive and ‘Bolshevik’. This was the essence of the anti-Semitism of Hitler, derived from the ‘Protocols of Zion’. But the combined activities of Hitler and then the Zionists changed that – Hitler exterminated a huge number of left-wing Jews, and Zionists saw their extermination this as a golden opportunity to lead ‘their’ people into the ranks of imperialism’s oppressor peoples.
Denying facts: Anti-Marxist Nonsense
This enormously powerful layer of the US population, the wealthiest capitalists in the United States, the most powerful imperialism, can accurately be described in 2025 as 60% Jewish and Zionist. This is simply a material and historical fact. As we noted earlier:
“Jews have an unusual, top-heavy social structure. On a world scale, in 2025 there were 3038 billionaires in the world according to the Fortune 5001 whereas the number of Jewish billionaires in the world, according to Forbes Israel, in 2025 was 2762. This means that, taking 2025 (last year) as the time of analysis, over 9% of billionaires in the world are Jewish, 9.055% to be more precise. Yet the number of Jews in the world is 15.8 million, which is 0.2% of the world’s population. This is approximately 45 times overrepresentation. The overwhelming majority of those Jewish billionaires live in the United States (163), Israel (39) and other imperialist countries of Western Europe, Canada and Australia (35) and a smattering elsewhere, including Russia, where a relatively lower number live (21). They are overwhelmingly concentrated in the imperialist West.
The overwhelmingly dominant ideology among bourgeois Jews is Political Zionism, an exilic ideology centred on Israel as a supposed refuge. Israel’s racist citizenship law, which gives those born Jewish anywhere in the world the right to citizenship, has the effect of creating a partially internationalised imperialist bourgeoisie loyal to Israel, who are massively and disproportionately represented in the US and West European ruling classes. The 2025 Forbes list puts the number of US billionaires in that year as 9023. As stated earlier, the number of US Jewish billionaires in 2025 was 163. Which means that 18% of billionaires in the US are Jewish, as compared to the proportion of Jewish people in the US population, which is 2%. But that is not all – because as you go up the rankings of billionaires by wealth, the disproportionate representation of Jews increases dramatically. Of the top 10 billionaires by wealth in the US, 6 of them are Jewish – Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer and Michael Dell. The other four – non-Jewish – are Elon Musk (the wealthiest), Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jensen Huang. This can be determined by comparison of Forbes Israel with mundane US sources on billionaire wealth that do not distinguish ethnicity.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/us-hegemony-drains-away-through-israeli-achilles-heel/. Follow this link to find footnotes.)
There you have the obvious explanation of the social basis of the extraordinary power of the Zionist lobby in the United States, which goes way beyond any considerations of foreign policy or any alliance. Such mundane matters do explain the fact that anyone who stands up for the Palestinian people in that country faces a never-ending witchhunt and abuses of power that never seem to cease. Similar things are happening in the UK, in Western Europe, in Australia and indeed in many places where this social layer has the upper hand politically.
The statement from the AOC that the “claim that Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in the ruling class is by definition antisemitic” implies than any attempt to measure the oppression or conversely, the privileged status of ethnic groups by looking at their respective social weights in the ruling class is “racist” and should be forbidden for socialists. Apparently, the ethnic makeup, social and political composition of the ruling class are the ruling class’s business only, and Marxists have no business looking at this. Even when, and apparently especially when, investigating questions like the racist nature of a given capitalist society. If black people are underrepresented in the ruling class, then black people have no business looking into the relationship of that to their second-class status in society. Likewise for Palestinians, or those who support them and oppose the current genocide. They have no business looking into the representation of Jewish-Zionists, the ethnic/political group that dispossessed them in Palestine, in the Western ruling classes.
Anyone who makes such an argument, either about black people, or about Palestinians and their defenders, is defending racial oppression. Where US blacks are concerned, their underrepresentation is simply a function of the overrepresentation of whites in high positions. As far as the relationship between Jewish-Zionists, and Palestinians and defenders of Palestine (even Jewish ones), the same is true. The fact that in previous, very different circumstances, when Jews were actually oppressed and facing genocide, the top-heavy social structure of the Jewish population was exploited for propaganda purposes by Nazi genociders does not make the persecution of Palestinians and their defenders by the disproportionately powerful layer of super-rich one iota less intolerable. My views, and those of the LCFI regarding the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and classic anti-semitism generally were alluded to in 2014 in my 2014 Theses on Zionism and the Jewish Question:
“The history of genocide against the Jews in the first half of the 20th century is ruthlessly used by propagandists for the Zionist project to justify today’s crimes against the Palestinians. Not only that, but in the earlier period anti-semites exploited the atypical social structure of the Jews – their overrepresentation in business and finance – as an important component of the paranoid, racist ideology that led to the Nazi genocide in Germany and Europe.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/)
That was elaborated more explicitly in a subsequent 2016 article:
The “…combination, of successful Jewish capital, and Jewish participation in the working class movement, was the material base that gave birth to a peculiar, racist and deeply reactionary ideology, classical anti-semitism, when capitalism ceased to be an expanding, progressive system in the late 19th century. This ideology was based on a counter-revolutionary racist demonology; it saw Jewish bourgeois as the financiers of a Jewish-led subversive movement against ‘Christian’ civilisation. This was initially the ideology of late-feudal reaction in 19th Century Tsarist Russia, where the large Jewish population was subjected to vicious attacks and pogroms. But as many Jewish refugees fled Russia to the West, the ideology of ‘anti-semitism’ and the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a major force in European politics first in France with the Dreyfus case, then in Germany in the early-to-mid 20th Century, culminating in the rise of the genocidal anti-Jewish National Socialists under Hitler’s leadership.” (https://socialistfight.com/2016/01/07/political-zionism-the-hegemonic-racism-of-the-early-21st-century-by-ian-donovan/)
The allegation that our analysis of the reasons for the social weight of Zionist in Western society has anything in common with the Protocols of Zionism is simply a cynical, deliberate lie. Propagated by someone who has no qualms about supporting a proxy war in Ukraine waged by devotees of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose forces participated both in the Nazi Judeocide in Ukraine, but also in the wider massacres of Russians on the Eastern front that were equally genocidal as 20 million Russians (27 million USSR citizens in all) died at the hands of the invading Nazis which Bandera’s forces were part of.
Even though the numerical/proportional strength of Zionist Jews among the ruling class is less pronounced in Europe than in the US, major attacks on the democratic rights of Palestinian people and their supporters are happening in Europe. This is true in every major imperialist country that engages with the Israel-Arab issue. Only perhaps Japan is an exception because of geographical distance and different origin.
There is no way any genuine Marxist can pretend that this is NOT the social basis of this phenomenon. Refusing to acknowledge this simply means denying reality, and those who do so are no defenders of the Palestinian people no matter how they try to present themselves, as ‘socialists’, ‘Marxists’, or promoters of motherhood and apple pie for that matter.
Smears that aim to suppress debate
The entire text of the discussion is shown below. It should be explained that there had been the beginnings of a discussion on the politics of David Miller, the sacked sociology professor who won a famous victory against Bristol University in 2024 when he was declared to have been unfairly dismissed for sharp criticisms of Zionism. The judgement said that he had been discriminated against for his ‘philosophical beliefs’ as an opponent of Zionism because of its racist and colonial character. David Miller’s victory at the Employment Tribunal means that anti-Zionist views should be regarded as a protected characteristic in British law, a major gain for defenders of the Palestinians. Which is why Zionists are desperately trying to overturn it on appeal, and why many weaklings on the British left are signalling their weakness in the face of the lobby by a renewed witchhunt against David Miller and anyone who dares to defend him. This is epitomised by the conduct of Simon Hannah in this debate, and his role in the suppression of this political debate.
He is the one who tried to brand our understanding of the pan-imperialist nature of the Jewish-Zionist ethnic faction in the ruling class as akin to the Protocols and hence ‘anti-Semitic” – a clear libel. He is the one who said that correcting a factual error made by someone in the discussion – misidentifying Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg as non-Jewish – amount to playing ‘spot the Jew’. A slur that sounds like something from the far right Spiked, racist, philosemitic anti-Arab rag, who in the context of the return to power of Donald Trump (whose own Vice-President Vance earlier compared him to Hitler), wrote a vile, racist hate-filled caricature of the mainly Moroccan community in Amsterdam who fought back when their community was attacked by a genocidal mob of Tel Aviv Maccabees’ supporters last November. The racist, pro-Zionist Spiked wrote the following:
“Last week, the left influencers of the West sank to a new, foul low. Their cant and bigotry was on full display. They started the week noisily gnashing their teeth over the election of the ‘fascist’ Donald Trump and ended it essentially shrugging their shoulders over fascist violence in Amsterdam. One day they were puffing themselves up to condemn the ‘fascist’ heading to the White House, the next they were ‘contextualising’ the hunting of Israelis by Jew-haters on mopeds. They weep virtuous tears over fake fascism while borderline excusing what feels like real fascism. Listen – when Europe’s middle classes start ‘contextualising’ anti-Jewish violence, it’s time to worry.” (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/11/the-moral-ghettoisation-of-the-jews/)
This far right, Trumpian garbage, branding the oppressed Moroccan migrant population of Amsterdam as akin to Nazis for resisting a riot and attempted pogrom by genocidal Israeli football thugs, carries a similar message to Simon Hannah’s outrageous slur that correcting a misidentification of Mark Zuckerberg as non-Jewish amounts to playing “spot the Jew”. Similar bullshit runs through Spiked’s hate piece which itself reads like an extract from Mein Kampf or the Protocols in its hate-filled description of the Muslim people of Amsterdam. Spiked is now a fascist, Zionazi hate publication, and epitomises our view that mainstream Political Zionism today should be treated as akin to Neo-Nazism.
But Hannah’s slur about the ‘Spot the Jew’ involved in identifying Mark Zuckerberg as Jewish, and one of the 60% of the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the US who are Jewish-Zionists, is basically identical to Spiked’s slur about a ‘Jew hunt’. Who after all is Zuckerberg? He is probably the most powerful social media baron in the world, the head of Meta which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and also WhatsApp, the most used mobile messenger app in the world. According to Drop Site News, in April 2025:
“A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorship-meta)
That tells you all you need to know about Mark Zuckerberg. He is a primary member of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste – Israel’s international dimension. Indeed, Drop Site News makes this clear when it writes:
“Government requests for takedowns generally focus on posts made by citizens inside that government’s borders, Meta insiders said. What makes Israel’s campaign unique is its success in censoring speech in many countries outside of Israel. What’s more, Israel’s censorship project will echo well into the future, insiders said, as the AI program Meta is currently training how to moderate content will base future decisions on the successful takedown of content critical of Israel’s genocide.” (ibid)
This is truly sinister. Under Zuckerberg, Meta has complied with 94% of requests for censorship from the state perpetrating the genocide – that is, trying to cover up for this genocide like a latter-day David Irving on acid. At least Irving wrote his awful apologias years after Hitler was dead and the Nazi holocaust was over. Whereas the genocide in Gaza is still going on, and is being extended to the West Bank, Lebanon, and to a degree even Iran – and every act of censorship and suppression of news about these events makes it easier for Israel to continue its mass-murdering.
Another example of Zuckerberg’s censorship of the internet has been the banning of Track AIPAC, an initiative on the fringe of the US Democrats that aimed to monitor and counter AIPAC interference in US elections. Their interference aims to force out anyone sympathetic to the Palestinians in any party. So Zuckerberg is thus directly involved in trying to suppress opposition to genocide in US politics (see https://thedemlabs.org/2026/02/12/why-meta-banned-track-aipac-joel-kaplan/)
By any objective standard, all these make Mark Zuckerberg’s current activities far worse than Irving’s literary denial of the Nazi holocaust years after it was over. Irving’s work had no impact of the course of the actual Nazi holocaust either way, but Zuckerberg’s genocide-denying censorship means he is not merely a genocide denier, but a genocide accomplice and indirect perpetrator in the current, ongoing genocide. And that’s not even touching on any military role that Meta’s many software arms are likely to be playing in this genocide.
So, when Simon Hannah accuses me of playing ‘spot the Jew’ for correcting a factual error about Zuckerberg’s Jewish origin to note that he is part of the 60% of the 10 richest US billionaires who are part of the Jewish-Zionist caste, he is race-baiting me for not being Jewish, in order to defend a genocide denier/perpetrator who is demonstrably much worse than the Nazi genocide denier, David Irving. This is a pretty disgusting level for a self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ to sink to. This is simply pathetic racism on his part, not mine, and no one with one iota of integrity would engage in this kind of disgusting behaviour.
And in this context, it should be noted that throughout the WhatsApp discussion, there is a drip-drip of assertions that to talk about “Jewish supremacism” is somehow ‘anti-Semitic’. In conditions where a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been going on for nearly three years (though now hidden by political manoeuvres) and such massacres have been extended way beyond Gaza. And a key, material agency of the promotion, and political pressure to aid that genocide (and to stop criticism of it particularly in the West) is the same Jewish-Zionist layer of capital. The notion that this analysis gives mystical powers to a ‘Jewish cabal’ voiced by A Green, the only hesitant defender of workers democracy in that discussion, is an anti-materialist, anti-Marxist liberal guilt-trip. Such things as Brexit and the rise of Trump show clearly that Western imperialist politics are highly factional and far from monolithic, and the Jewish-Zionist caste are effective in such bourgeois factional terms because disproportionate capitalist property means disproportionate political power in a capitalist society. This is elementary. And an additional factor is that the dominant attitude of the non-Jewish bourgeoisie has shifted, with the rise of Zionism and also of neoliberalism, and the major role that key Jewish-Zionist ideologues played in that, from Judeophobia to Judeophilia.
In that context, the attempt to suppress the right of socialists in the working-class movement to criticise Jewish supremacism, as happened in that discussion, is simply evidence of Jewish chauvinism, if not outright supremacism, on the part of those demanding the suppression. In the context of the previous betrayals of the Corbynites regarding phoney witchhunts against ‘anti-Semitism’, that is yet another betrayal by those involved. And it’s a complete betrayal of the call that Zahra Sultana put out for “a party of the whole left”. ALDA now seems to want a party of Zionist capitulators. Full on opponents of Zionism are not wanted.
The implicit Nazi baiting primarily by Hannah in this is disgusting because if anyone is involved in support for Nazi terrorism it is those, such as ACR and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign that they support, who are up to their necks in support for a proxy war that NATO is waging through Nazi auxiliaries such as Azov. Pseudo lefts like ACR and other NATO fans have tried to make out that having a Jewish president somehow means that Ukraine cannot really be a Nazi-dominated regime. But Zelensky now proudly associates himself with the Azov brigade and the like, who despite the best efforts of NATO spin doctors, glory in Nazi insignia like the Wolfsangel and ‘blood and soil’ Red and Black flags.
Just as the bulk of the far right supports Israel, the bulk of them support NATO’s Nazi war drive in Ukraine. There is a minority on the far right, Nazi fossils, who demur, upholding Hitler’s old style anti-Semitism and we in the Consistent Democrats have a principled history of public, outspoken opposition to any alliance of the anti-imperialist movement in defence of Russia and the Donbass with such people. Our tendency, and the broader International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) united front we support, have been sharply and publicly critical of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain and No2NATONo2War for putting the fascist chancer David Clews of the far right Unity News Network, a fellow traveller of Mark Collett’s old-style Nazi ‘Patriotic Alternative’, on their platforms. We have had two considerable public controversies with Galloway’s supporters over this grave error, such as here from 2023 (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/iuafs-statement-no-no2nato-platform-for-fascist-david-clews/) or a more recent 2026 dispute where the IUAFS logo was used without our consent by those promoting ‘unity’ with Clews (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/iuafs-statement-on-the-suspension-of-bill-obrien/).
The public record is clear – we in the Consistent Democrats, the LCFI, and IUAFS who we are involved with, have a clear record of publicly denouncing both the Ukrainian Nazis involved in NATO’s proxy war and the small minority of traditional, anti-Jewish Nazis who oppose that war for reasons of national isolationism. Unlike the ACR, who are supporters of NATO’s proxy war, and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, which simply support the NATO/Nazi war who simply cheer for Zelensky and his Nazis with their persecution of Russians and Russian-speakers. This follows on from the betrayals of the Corbynites regarding phoney witchhunts against ‘anti-Semitism’. And it’s a complete betrayal of the call that Zaarah Sultana put out for “a party of the whole left”. ALDA now seems to want a party of Zionist capitulators. Full on opponents of Zionism are not wanted.
