The response to Corbyn’s leadership was not the result of random events. It was the culmination of a strategy that had been instigated by the State of Israel and developed over time, with the involvement of some of the main players in what would become Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism crisis’.  – Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Killing Corbynism

The picture at the head of this article comes from the Isle of Thanet News, in December 2018. The headline it accompanies is:

Labour’s Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt rejected as parliamentary candidate over tweet accusation

The explanation given in the article is that tweets from an account ‘used by Dr Gordon-Nesbitt as well as other academics, questioned the “Zionist sympathies” of Jewish MPs and defended suspended member Jackie Walker’.

Gordon-Nesbitt said she had endorsements to demonstrate her comments were not antisemitic but, Labour’s NEC of the time rejected her anyway.

That’s typical of the way we lost most of the people who could and would have carried Corbyn’s Labour to victory, and is why listening to a talk by Gordon-Nesbitt just now is of particular interest, but I’ve more recently come across the destructiveness of ‘Zionist sympathies’ in a quite different arena:

I was intrigued when I first read Jane Clare Jones’ views on ‘the politics of disgust’. That was one of many useful pieces I read in The Radical Notion, a feminist project I discovered some years ago through attendance at my all-time favourite feminist conference, FiLiA. For most of those years, FiLiA felt like a refuge – a network of sisters from all colours of politics and none, promoting and protecting the needs, interests and legal rights of women and girls.

It was that article, and the sense of sisterhood lost, that ran through my mind when I saw the downturned mouths and crunched up faces of former ‘sisters’ at FiLiA 2025. They had got themselves into such a stew about what they were calling ‘the Islamo-left’ that they could not help but show their extreme disgust at our wearing Palestine badges or keffiyahs, signifying our opposition to apartheid and genocide.

Like most instances of ‘the politics of disgust’ that feeling they displayed appears to come from a political cult, a conspiracy theory, in this case the idea that ‘Islamists’ are taking over our world and, (the particular line of Zionist feminists) are the most gut-wrenching threat facing women and girls in our times. Some call it the ‘Eurabia’ theory, others ‘the great replacement theory’. It informs the ideas of racist groups as varied as the AWL (nominally on the left) and the EDL (most definitely on the right), and the story told in Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt’s book traces those ideas, with an abundance of double-checks, cross-references and source footnotes, all the way from the ‘violently anti-Arab’ Irgun Zvai Leumi, the terrorist group who in 1946 bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem to the modern JNF UK, whose Chair Samuel Hayek has, amongst other shocking statements, claimed that ‘all civilisation…is at war with Islam’.

That’s why I think the subtitle of her book, Zionism’s War on Socialism shows the far greater reach it has than the main title, Killing Corbynism does.

The speakers at the event I went to on Saturday were particularly apposite to Hastings, and the large audience the event attracted included a lot of Corbyn-era Labour Party officers. If you’re not from Hastings, the key point you need to know is that most of our party officers were expelled from the Labour Party in a purge that Kier Starmer had the nerve to claim was ‘solving Labour’s antisemitism problem’. The reason that was absurd as well as plain wrong is that most of the people Hastings Labour Party lost in that purge were Jewish socialists. That number included the Chair of the evening, Leah Levane, who is also Co-Chair of JVL (originally Jewish Voice for Labour).

 So for Hastings, the main focus was to listen to our former parliamentary candidate Peter Chowney, former councillor Leah Levane and Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt take apart and assess what Zionism did to our political chances, but the book actually covers a lot more than that. When asked about the plethora of notes and sources, Gordon-Nesbitt said the main motivation for her meticulous checking and referencing was to cover her own back – she, as much as anyone, knows the vindictive nature of those she is challenging. It’s what Herzog called for back in 2008: “a front consisting of governments, judicial systems, international organisations, public opinion shapers, academic leaders and experts.”

– but there’s something else…

Conspiracy Theories and The Conspiracy

It’s worth spending some time on the Wikipedia page about Conspiracy Theories, because once you know their characteristics, and the nature of the cult-thinking that gravitates to them, they become much easier to unpick.

One key point is that conspiracy theories do not require evidence. They require emotional attachment – that’s why those who hold to them are such passionate, unpredictable, disgusted opponents. My understanding of that became very personal knowledge when I was the focus of those bile-filled stares at FiLiA. It’s easy to see how a less seasoned activist might quail under those gazes, and take up lip-service to The Belief, just to get away from such piercing hatred.

The disgusted response expressed by those driven by emotion rather than policy was much in evidence during Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ – I remember quite a few people responding to our campaigners during the Corbyn years with that downturned mouth, that screwed up face, saying, “I just can’t stand Corbyn,” and not being able to say why – or else making some evidence-free statement about ‘disgusting’ anti-Semitism or the supposed effects of ‘hobnobbing with terrorists’. (All politicians do — it’s how they reached the Good Friday Agreement, for example – it just became ‘disgusting’ when Corbyn did it.)

A friend of mine thought it might be that some people have an unconscious aversion to beards – interesting because campaigners recently have seen the same kinds of response to Zack Polanski, and someone said she’d wondered if it was his teeth.

I don’t think it was, I think it’s a part of that same campaign, and I think it’s a great shame that the local Green councillor who was invited to Gordon-Nesbitt’s talk did not take up the offer, because the Greens really need to know what they’re dealing with here.

So: for any Greens reading this who’re having trouble with claims of anti-Semitism or accusations of being ‘the Islamo-left’: when you see that look of passionate disgust on someone’s face, don’t waste your time trying to have a rational debate, don’t go on the defensive, just accuse right back. It’s the only thing that works. If you don’t believe me, grab hold of a well-researched, detailed book like Killing Corbynism so that you can understand what happens to anyone who tries to be reasonable in that particular situation.

DARVO

The project Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt is analysing in her book is also amplified by a generous helping of DARVO – a tactic well known to feminists, as amongst other things, it describes a typical behaviour pattern of abusive male partners. The acronym here stands for 1. Deny, 2. Attack, 3. Reverse victim and offender. A male wishing to maintain his public persona whilst mistreating his wife or partner will respond to accusations of violence with a passionate denial, immediately followed up with an attack on the character or behaviour of his spouse, aiming to claim the sympathy of his audience for himself, as a victim of her supposed crime, and because of the emotional power of his claims, they often work on friends and colleagues, even as the wife is walking around bearing the bruises that are evidence of who the real victim is.

In the case of Zionism, a dramatic smoke screen was needed to maintain the political world’s support for this, the last racist, colonialist movement to survive through the more egalitarian times of the 20^th century, and that smokescreen was provided by consistently presenting Israeli settlers as victims of antisemitism, and Arabs, particularly Muslims, as terrifying enemies of Jews. The follow-up tactic of course, was to write off any attempts to discuss the reach of Zionist propaganda as an antisemitic conspiracy-theory.

It was the emotional effect of all that which fuelled the vicious hatred in the faces of those women at FiLiA, who had no coherent argument against our belief that feminism should loudly and visibly oppose apartheid and genocide, but whose feelings that Zionism had instilled drove them into bitter little circles, cursing our presence and our #FreePalestine badges. There can be no comradely debate in politics whilst conspiracy theories rule hearts and DARVO disables minds.

The ultimate DARVO

Thus, having more or less flattened Gaza and laid waste to the remaining Palestinian areas of the West Bank (all presented as ‘self-defence’), Israel is throwing huge amounts of ordinance into its invasion and destruction of Lebanon. If, however, Hezbollah injures any of the invading soldiers in its defensive actions, they are much-mourned victims of terrorism…

The truth

The effectiveness of Zionist tactics throughout the 20^th century really was extraordinary and, here’s why that subtitle Zionism’s War on Socialism is so important. Thanks to Israel’s dramatically excessive violence in recent years, to the dogged determination of Gazans to publicise what was happening to them, and the resulting global response in the form of the #FreePalestine movement, many of us can now see right through that smokescreen now, and many are beginning to realise the extent of the problem. To protect a right wing, regressive, colonialist project, Zionism has had to reach into every government, every establishment organisation and every mainstream media outlet and everywhere they reach, their job is to quash international socialism and, as a result, drag world politics eternally towards the racist, reactionary right.

… which explains an awful lot about what we’re all going through right now, as the need to end poverty, challenge genocide and address the climate crisis reaches a last desperate moment, and we find ourselves instead slipping back into a racist, reactionary, right-wing world — how much of that is down to the ubiquitous influence of Zionism constantly knocking back socialist voices? As Gordon-Nesbitt says in her introduction to this book, a ‘precise analysis of how the state of Israel exerts its influence is almost completely absent from mainstream discourse’. We can see the effects all around us…

… but armed with Gordon-Nesbitt’s book, we can trace and demonstrate the sources of those harms – and my goodness we need to, if we’re ever to move on to dealing with those truly terrible crises we need to be tackling. Go buy yourself a copy of it now, and have it on the shelf ready for the next wave of ‘hasbara’.

Remember the day the PLP planned a vote of no confidence in Corbyn, on the grounds that there was no support for him…?

You will see by now why so many (myself included) have pretty much lost faith in the whole idea of party politics, a decade after Corbyn took the helm and inspired millions with his ‘better, kinder politics’, and why all our attempts to get organised again are derailed by bile-filled attacks from those who’ve lost themselves in ‘the politics of disgust’.

Let me leave you with a few lines from Gordon-Nesbitt’s preface:

The destruction of Her Majesty’s Opposition at the hands of a foreign state is one of the most egregious scandals in recent political history. This ultimately successful campaign represents a significant setback for all those living under occupation in Palestine, with particularly deadly consequences in the wake of October 2023. It has also caused devastation in the British left from which it will take time to recover. – Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Killing Corbynism

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