Unintended consequences, or the West's blunder in Iran

As war rages in Iran, it’s worth pausing to imagine a different kind of leadership.

Smoke over Tehran following an Israeli attack on 13 June 2025
By Mehr News Agency, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Think of it as a kind of fantasy exercise — like fantasy football — assembling the best possible team, while knowing it won’t be perfect.

So let’s imagine a leader of Iran not simply appointed by a bunch of religious figures, backed by armed groups whose main role is suppressing opposition. The leader we’re looking for owes his position to the support of the country’s secular parliament. And among the pledges to which he owes his election is putting an end to power built on brutal repression. Equally, he’s committed to working to limit the power of the clergy over wider society.

On the positive side, he’d be set on improving social benefits across Iranian society, ensuring that poorer Iranians, in towns and countryside alike, have the jobs and land they need to prosper. To fund that kind of programme, he’d use the revenue generated by Iran’s immense oil industry as well as by a progressive taxation system, in which the wealthiest contribute a greater share to government spending than the poor.

He needn’t be some kind of secular saint. What might his faults be? I suspect that in his hurry to achieve his laudable goals he might want to take emergency powers and would ask them to be granted to him by the very parliament that put him in office. That would reduce parliamentary authority. He might even go further and start to act against people who oppose him, leading to fracturing in his support.

So by no means a perfect leader. Even one who might in the long run prove the architect of his own downfall. But wouldn’t that be preferable to what both the Iranians and we, citizens of other countries, are having to deal with today?

Well, that was actually no fantasy. What I’ve been giving you is a thumbnail picture of Mohammad Mossadegh. He was Prime Minister of Iran, for a little under two and a half years, between 1951 and 1953. 

Mohammad Mossadegh

Public domain picture from Wikimedia Commons

This was the time when the British Empire was going into its terminal decline. India had already won its independence. The fifties would be when, in the phrase of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a wind of change began to blow through Africa as colony after colony in that continent left the Empire too.

Iran was never a colony. Most of its oil, however, was controlled by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became British Petroleum and today is known as BP). The British government had a controlling stake in the company so, in effect, Britain held undue authority over Iranian affairs.

When Mossadegh decided to nationalise the oil industry, to deliver the revenues he needed for his ambitious social programmes, the news was badly received in London. Declining power though it was, Britain still had the capacity to do damage, and it also had close ties with the power that was growing to replace it, the United States. The British put a blockade on Iranian oil and, with the Americans, persuaded Saudi Arabia to step in and increase production so the West wouldn’t suffer as a result. 

The effect was massive. Iran’s oil revenues collapsed, Mossadegh’s programme was doomed to failure, and the Iranian people condemned to poverty. As opposition grew, Mossadegh found himself becoming increasingly dictatorial in his moves to hold on to power. 

Now the American CIA, far better resourced than Britain’s spy agency MI6, began to take the lead role. Supported by Britain, US intelligence agents organised and funded a movement against Mossadegh. In August 1953, it succeeded, he was brought down, and with that, Iran returned to rule by the Shah — but now more dependent than ever on Western support.

In return, the western powers regained control of the oil.

It would prove to be a decision with long and far-reaching consequences.

A rare opportunity, to move towards a stable, secular and at least slightly democratic system in Iran, was lost. Over the next 26 years, the Shah steadily increased his power. That became particularly significant after the oil shock of 1973, when a surge in oil revenues seemed to put the Shah in a stronger position than ever. The growth in wealth gave him unprecedented power, allowing him to pursue rapid and far-reaching modernisation.

But the pace of change unsettled Iranian society. Economic disruption, social tensions, and growing opposition forced the regime to rely increasingly on repression to maintain control.

Even so, he could not hold the line. Opposition spread across the country, and in the end the army, though still intact, would not act decisively to keep him in power. In 1979, it was his turn to fall.

What replaced him?

Well, another Mossadegh regime might have been something to celebrate. But that wasn’t to be. Instead, out of the many currents that had opposed the Shah, many of them secular, it was the one led by the leading cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, that took power. Iran was converted into a theocracy, the Islamic Republic. 

A few months later, supporters of the new regime had seized the US embassy in Tehran. Embassy staff were held hostage for 444 days, well over a year.

Within a year of the embassy seizure, Iran was at war with Iraq. It was a horribly bloody war that would last eight years. Despite Iraq’s powerful military, at the time still being armed by the US (who’d be fighting it themselves within twenty years), Iran emerged badly hurt but having lost no territory – effectively a victory from the Iranian point of view.

Khomeini died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ali Khamenei, who would rule for the next 37 years until he was killed at the outbreak of the present war. 

He headed a nation shaped and militarised by the war with Iraq and steeped in anti-American feeling, to which was added hostility towards Israel. It’s his nation which, despite the loss of its leader, is now putting up far stronger resistance to American and Israeli forces than many expected.

The war has inflicted severe damage on Iran and caused major disruption to the global economy, driving up oil prices and restricting the supply of key products such as fertiliser and helium.

Led by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the United States and Israel appear to have entered the conflict without a clear and agreed set of objectives. So far, the gains are hard to discern.

And the tragedy is that it’s hardly the West’s first error over Iran. It flows from its much earlier mistake. The blunder made 73 years ago. 

Ousting Mossadegh in 1953 certainly benefited oil interests in Britain and the United States. But the price of those short-term gains has been a long chain of consequences — from the Shah’s increasingly repressive rule, to his overthrow, to the establishment of a far more rigid regime — leading to yet another destructive conflict today.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened if Mossadegh had been left in place. There would, I’m sure, have been serious problems. But would they have been as bad as what has actually happened?

I seriously doubt it.

Mike Huckabee: right by accident, wrong intentionally

There are some remarkable characters in the gang surrounding Donald Trump. Most recently, I’ve found it fascinating to catch up on Mike Huckabee. 

Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel
Innovator in his approach to diplomacy

Huckabee used to be governor of Arkansas, a post to which his daughter has now ascended. One of the great things about republics as opposed to monarchies, is that they pass on power by election rather than by inheritance. The US is a case in point, as long as you ignore such presidential cases as the George H.W. Bush-George W. Bush father-son pair or, rather earlier, the William Henry Harrison-Benjamin Harrison grandfather-grandson pair and the even earlier John Adams-John Quincy Adams father-son pair.

The Huckabees are at least progressive, in that they’ve allowed the father's inheritance to pass to a daughter rather than insisting that it go to a son.

In any case, Huckabee continues to occupy a key position on the political stage, nearly twenty years after ending his time as state governor. Today he’s the US Ambassador to Israel. Now rather a lot of people – a growing number – around the world are becoming increasingly upset at the behaviour of Israel in Gaza. 

Why, some have gone so far as to talk about genocide.

Huckabee, though, has the answer to all that. He seems to have been annoyed, in particular, by the decision of the UK government to recognise Palestine as a state. On social media, Huckabee told the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer where to get off. In no uncertain terms:

So Israel is expected to surrender to Hamas & feed them even though Israeli hostages are being starved. Did UK surrender to Nazis and drop food to them? Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer? That wasn’t food you dropped. If you had been PM then UK would be speaking German!

Is it just me or is there a bit of what-aboutery there? You know, as in, ‘hey, you want to criticise what Israel’s doing in Gaza? You want to have a go at Israeli forces killing civilians? What about what you did to Dresden?’

Still, he clearly thinks that the fire-bombing of Dresden was a good thing, not a bad one, presumably including the fact that it caused a firestorm so intense that it sucked the oxygen out of the air and many people died of suffocation. And what he’s doing is drawing a parallel between that atrocity and what’s happening in Gaza. Which, presumably, he regards as equally justified.

I wouldn’t disagree. It seems to me that it’s precisely as justified to do what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza as it was to set fire to Dresden. I suppose it’s helpful of him to highlight the equivalence. Mind you, I don’t think that he’d agree with my view that the Dresden raids constituted a major, unacknowledged and unprosecuted war crime, and Israel’s violence in Gaza and starvation of its population is another. The parallel he draws has merit, but not the way he meant. He’s got it right, but only by accident.

But are the two atrocities really equivalent? The four raids on Dresden may have been ghastly but at least they only lasted from 13 to 15 February 1945. The Gaza incursion has lasted 22 months and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Unsurprisingly, it has caused more deaths: the best estimate for Gaza is some 60,000 and rising, while most commentators agree that the Dresden raids killed around 25,000. But, worse than that, the Gaza action is threatening an entire population, believed to be about 2.1 million today. 

Israel is targeting an entire people, and that whole people is in danger of death. Mostly by starvation, though Israeli Defence Forces are helping the process along by bombing or firing on people, in particular when they come looking for food. War on a people is pretty much a textbook definition of genocide.

It's never been really clear to me where to draw the line between a war crime and a crime against humanity. However, I can’t help feeling that it’s somewhere between Dresden and Gaza. That, though, isn’t anything Huckabee’s ever going to admit.

And if he’s right, without meaning to be, to categorise Gaza and Dresden as similar events, he’s wrong to draw a veil over the difference in scale and in genocidal intent between them. What he got right, as I suggested before, he got right by accident. What he’s getting wrong, I suspect, he’s getting wrong on purpose.

The hallmark of the Trump regime.

Glimmer of humanity

They say that the first casualty of war is the truth.

I’m not sure of that. It strikes me that both reason and humanity go first. The killing of the truth becomes necessary because the perpetrators want to hide their previous adoption of irrationality and inhumanity. 

For instance, take the reactions to the Hamas attacks on southern Israel. These have been rightly described as some of the most brutal in the history of terrorism, with kids tortured and murdered in front of their parents, or the parents in front of their kids. Such is the sense of horror this inspires that some seem to feel that any kind of retaliation is legitimate, however many victims it produces and whether they’re with Hamas themselves or not.

Meanwhile, on the other side, I’ve seen interviews with people who simply can’t bring themselves to condemn the level of brutality those attacks generated, but instead simply point to their own grievances concerning the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state over 70 years. It’s hard to believe that they feel that history justifies that level of cruelty towards innocents. It seems, however, that there are those who reckon it does.

I’ve also heard people claiming that “the Jews” are wreaking terrible harm on the Palestinians. I want to scream “not all Jews are Israelis”, but even that wouldn’t be saying enough. I’d need to add, “not all Israelis favour state violence against the Palestinians”. We’ll see that at the end of this post

This kind of intransigent positioning leads to the killing of the truth, as you can see from the news coverage of the Gazan hospital hit by some kind of weapon, leading to the death of more than 400 people. Somebody fired the missiles that did the damage. But everyone who might have been responsible is denying it was them. Someone, therefore, is lying.

What’s most interesting about that lie is that it’s clear that the perpetrator realises that the action was shameful and that’s why they won’t take responsibility. They did it, but they knew it was wrong. And that knowledge didn’t stop them.

In this terrible fog of hatred and desire for revenge, deepened by the lies and evasions, it’s a comfort to find even a small glimmer of decency and humanity.

For me that was provided by a remarkable man, whose book Sapiens impressed me when I read it. He shows the deepest understanding of the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. He also seems to have the most intelligent suggestion for a way out of the mess, if only enough people could be found to take it.

He's the Israeli historian and writer, Yuval Noah Harari.

Yuval Noah Harari

He gave an interview to an Indian news service, CNN-News18. The recording on YouTube is a little messy, with more than one instance of the interview, not starting at the same point, but his statements are clear enough.

Harari’s stance strikes me as enormously insightful. Hamas is actually fighting peace itself. A Gaza strip at peace, maybe even prosperous, doesn’t fit the Hamas world view. How would a peaceful Gaza still provide a role for Hamas?

That strikes me as the best answer I’ve heard to the question, “what on Earth was Hamas trying to achieve?” They knew that if they did actually go to war with Israel, as they claimed, they’d be crushed. But if they were at war with peace? That I can see them achieving.

Incidentally, that means that the best way of defeating them in the long term is to work once more towards peace. That would leave them no reason for being. No better ultimate solution to the problem of dealing with Hamas can exist.

That, though, is for the longer term. The immediate task for Israel has to be to put an end to Hamas's capacity to engage in terrorism. That means military action, however unpleasant that may be, since it’s clear that nothing else can possibly neutralise the constant threat from one of the ugliest terrorist organisations the world has seen.

How should Israel tackle that task?

Harari gets it absolutely right. He declares:

Israel now is in a struggle, not just to protect its territory and citizens but to protect its humanity... Israel must keep the possibility of peace alive.

What’s more, as Harari suggests, Israel needs to find a way of doing that which doesn’t reduce it to the same level as Hamas. I think Harari’s right to say that Israel doesn’t deliberately target civilians as Hamas does, but it can behave with such indifference towards civilian life that the numbers killed become horrific. Can it rise above that kind of behaviour?

Well, I don’t have a lot of hope. People who’ve been hurt badly often only want to hurt back. The present Israeli government hasn’t shown itself particularly inclined to moderation and decency. As for Hamas, it certainly wouldn’t recognise either moderation or decency if it tripped over them in the street.

But, as Harari says, maybe international pressure can begin to make itself felt. Maybe it can push two intransigent parties to see that both sides are made up of humans and humans have human rights. The starting point for any actual progress in that sad region is for both sides to recognise that truth.

Let’s just hope that it isn’t one of the truths that have become casualties of war.

Letrice in Beirut, or how we like to turn a bad situation into something far worse

It was Paris on the Mediterranean. It was sea-bathing in November, it was visiting Roman ruins in a blouse, it was sitting with colleagues on a sunny café terrace when at home everyone was indoors or wrapped in coats and scarves. It was no wonder her visit to Beirut left my mother, Leatrice, with indelible memories that she was still sharing with me 70 years later, not long before she died.

Leatrice in Baalbek or at the beach
She was a pretty 24-year old, but maybe already a little uptight...

It was 1948. A single trip abroad as a child had been followed by the thirties in London, then the air raid warnings and the bombs of the war, then the harsh winter of 1946, the bomb sites on every street, the rationing, the general gloom of the past-war years.

Leatrice, as I’ve mentioned before, got out just as soon as she could. In 1948, she was working as a typist for UNESCO in Paris. It organised a conference in Beirut and, to be a success in those pre-Word processing days, a conference had to have a legion of low paid assistants along, to record the words of the important or self-important, and to produce the documents without which no one would believe they’d actually been doing very much.

For Leatrice, it was a sheer joy to be there, to see the sights, to go for a swim, to visit the ruins at Baalbek, to enjoy the pavement life. I was reminded of that when going through another bundle of old photos, as part of a task that is probably going to take most of my retirement even if I have a long one, and came across more pictures of that trip.

What made the pictures all the more poignant was that I was looking at them just as I’d learned that Donald Trump, in what passes for wisdom in that orange head of his, had decided that the best action he could take in response to new threats from Iran, was to launch a drone-borne missile strike to assassinate the senior Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Now Soleimani was a ruthless autocrat and his hands are stained with the blood of thousands killed in combat or simply murdered in cold blood. The world is absolutely is arguably better off without him in it. But the same could be said of Saddam Hussein: we’re better off freed of him, or at least we would have been, had what followed in his wake not been far worse. Indeed, one of the most toxic consequences of bringing down Saddam was the rise of Soleimani.

It seems we don’t like learning from our mistakes (or, for those like Trump, perhaps we’re unable to learn), and keep thinking that a quick fix – the invasion of Iraq, the murder of Soleimani – is likely to deliver a long-term solution.

The reality, of course, is that Iran will avenge the death. It may do so directly itself, or it may use a proxy force, perhaps in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia once more, perhaps in Syria attacking Israel, or indeed perhaps through its client militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Whichever option they eventually select, it’s going to make the Middle East a still more tragic region than it already is.

Especially as whatever action they take, there will almost certainly be further retaliation from the US or its clients in Israel or Saudi Arabia. So things will ratchet up. Which, you may remember, is rather how things went after the invasion of Iraq.

Looking at my mother’s Beirut photos reminds me how far we’ve come.

Clockwise: the venue for the UNESCO conference;
Leatrice third from left at a pavement café; a street scene; the seafront.

Leatrice agreed with the description of Beirut as ‘Paris on the Mediterranean’. She regarded it as a sliver of paradise. But that was before the US and Russia, Israel and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, to say nothing of its own internal conflicts, started interfering the life out of it.

I’d like to say that they’ve turned a paradise into a purgatory, except that purgatory is supposed to be where souls are purged ready to enter heaven. Sometimes, the Middle East looks more like a soul condemned to hell, from which there is no hope of escape. Certainly, none while its destiny is being set by Trump or Soleimani, Netanyahu or Assad, Putin or Mohammad bin Salman.

3-D Corbyn: fiddling with anti-Semitism while Labour burns

The wonderful thing about faith is that it can never be wrong. If the world doesn’t end on the day the true believers announced, it’s only because they misinterpreted the Lord’s words or because they were unworthy of having their beliefs so spectacularly confirmed.

So it is with all cults. They can never be in error, and above all their guru is infallible. Consequently, if they begin to fail, there can only be one of two explanations: nefarious behaviour by traitors within, or vicious plots by conspirators from outside.

It’s happening inside the British Labour Party. It’s losing members, losing money and above all losing electoral support. Up against a hopelessly divided and discredited government, Labour is at least six points behind in the polls where normally the Opposition would be several points ahead.

That can’t be down to the leader. He is faultless, a man of unimpeachable integrity, remarkable courage and unsurpassed wisdom. So if the movement is failing under his enlightened hand, it can only be because it is being undermined by unconscionable elements doing the devil’s work.

Saint Jezza - incapable of only one thing: error

The internal traitors are numerous. They are red Tories or Blairites – frankly, the terms are interchangeable – and they have nothing better to do with their time than undermine the Labour Party and its revered leader. They are working for the return of a Tory government even if, as is the case of many of them, they have spent half a lifetime campaigning for Labour governments.

There is no contradiction here: those weren’t true Labour governments, merely Tory administrations in disguise. All these renegades were in fact sabotaging true Labour, infiltrating the party to poison the wells of untainted faith now running true thanks to the great leader.

But Labour isn’t only beset by internal enemies. There are powerful outside foes too. Chief amongst them is the government of Israel.

Were you so naïve as to think that Israel might be principally preoccupied with such nations as the United States or Russia? Or perhaps those, on its doorstep, which have threatened its very existence in the past, such as Syria or Egypt?

You are so wrong. What keeps Netanyahu awake at night is the prospect of a Labour government in Britain led by the sainted Jeremy Corbyn. His diplomatic service and intelligence agencies have bent their scheming minds to the most urgent of their tasks: preventing Corbyn ever entering No 10 as Prime Minister.

Some voices in senior government circles in Israel might be tempted to say “Stop Corbyn? Why bother? He’s sinking himself quite fast enough on his own”. They don’t last long. They too are the internal enemies, in this case of Israel, blind to the true threat posed by a minor nation on the edge of Europe, from which it is currently struggling to isolate itself still further.

Fortunately, Israel has friends it can count on in Britain. I, of course, am one of them, as is every British Jew. We do Israel’s bidding, even those of us who speak out against that state and denounce its behaviour as shameful. That’s just a smokescreen to disguise our true and devious aims.

Let’s be clear, by the way. These Corbynists who denounce what is, in fact, an international Jewish conspiracy against their man, are not anti-Semites. It’s true that the trope of international Jewish conspiracies has, in the past, been a hallmark of anti-Semitism, but it isn’t in this case. Because the international Jewish conspiracy denounced previously was a fraud, made up by anti-Semites; the one denounced by Corbynists today is real, and they have TV programmes from Al Jazeera to prove it.

What this all means is that everything Corbyn’s doing is precisely right, and exactly what is required to take Labour back to power. Only these vicious conspiracies stand in his way. Fortunately, he continues, imperturbable, to pursue what I have come to think of as his 3-D strategy.

By that I don’t mean that Corbyn is particularly 3-dimensional, except in the most trivially physical sense. There are times he strikes me as not even two-dimensional but one-dimensional, a man following a straight line leading nowhere – or, at least, nowhere useful. In fact, given his tendency to vanish whenever the going gets tough, it might even be sensible to think of him as a single point, vanishing over time.

No, when I say 3-D I’m referring to his preferred approach to any crisis, based on three Ds:

• Denial: he starts by claiming that there isn’t a problem
• Dithering: he takes as long as he’s can to avoid reaching a decision
• Delay: if finally forced to take a decision, he makes every effort to delay its implementation

It has, indeed, been the case of his approach to anti-Semitism. He started by pretending there was no problem (and many of his followers still do); he then spent months taking no decision about what to do about it; when finally he set up an organisation to take some action, he let time slip by ensuring that the gentlest measures possible were adopted as slowly as could be managed.

It’s the approach he prefers. His attitude was identical when it came to Brexit: he sat on the fence as long as he could until forced off it by the membership. Now he’s following along behind those he’s supposed to be leading, in the hope that the whole thing might blow over without his every being obliged to do anything meaningful.

However, please don’t imagine that this might have anything to do with Labour’s dire standing in the polls. Oh, no. The leader’s got it right.

It’s the traitors who are stabbing him in the back. They and they alone are responsible for the failure of the project. Especially thanks to the backing they have from a major international conspiracy.

Based, of course, in Jerusalem.

Leatrice in Beirut

It’s strange how much certain things can change in seventy years. It’s even stranger, and rather sadder, to see how certain other things have grimly resisted every attempt at change. Or got worse.

In 1948, my mother Leatrice was living in Paris and working for UNESCO. In November, she travelled to Beirut for a conference and she wrote to her parents on the 16th, soon after arriving:

… I hope you have already received my cable. I didn’t want to let you know until I arrived that I was travelling by air, knowing that you would worry, but we had a most uneventful trip…

Flying was still an adventure seventy years ago. It’s true, I tend to phone Danielle after a flight to say I’ve arrived safely, but I do the same after a train journey or even a car trip. As it happens, I find the prospect of travelling any great distance by car far more daunting than catching a plane. I have more confidence in the pilot’s ability to fly his plane than in my own driving – or that of other drivers on the road.

As for a cable – a telegram – I don’t even know who still provides a service these days. Certainly, I don’t remember the last time I sent or received one. In the ages of text messages or emails, does anyone use telegrams?

Leatrice (third from left) enjoying a moment's relaxation in Beirut, 1948

The trip to Beirut marked Leatrice for life. She mentioned it frequently down the years. And looking at her letters home, it’s easy to see why.

The mountains now have snow on them, she wrote on 20 November. It is cold, clear and sunny. This country grows on one. The colour on the hills mixed with the brilliance of the Mediterranean is unbelievably lovely. I have come to like the Lebanese very much. After the coldness of the Parisian, it is heart-warming to meet people who laugh with their eyes as well as their mouths.

The people may have been great, but apparently Leatrice was concerned about the sanitary conditions:

… if we drink any water, we put chlorine in it. It tastes exactly like a swimming bath, but is at least disinfected.

Personally, I’d prefer to take my chance on the infection. On the other hand, it took me a week to recover from the Cairo belly I brought back from Egypt ten days ago, so maybe Leatrice was right.

But she hadn’t finished with the subject of the people.

… it is quite obvious that they are a pure Semitic race. Olive skinned, long heads, black hair, large black eyes, curly mouths.

The racial comments I’d probably avoid, personally, but I like the underlying message, one Leatrice would repeat throughout her life: ethnically, there’s no difference between the Arabs of the Levant and Jews. The idea that there should be racial tension between them, far less conflict, is simply indefensible.

But, and this is one of the things that has not changed in seventy years, or if anything has got worse, that conflict is proving agonising and irresolvable.

We touched down in Damascus and came by taxis over the border into Lebanon… We saw some truckloads of soldiers in Syria, but there isn’t actually much military activity there. Lebanon isn’t actually at war, although Syria is.

The Israeli-Arab war of 1948 had already broken out.

Isn’t it curious that at the time Syria had been relatively untouched by war? To the extent that it was regarded as safe enough to bring staff through to Beirut? That wouldn’t be the case today.

In any case, these days we’d fly directly to Beirut.

I am, of course, very tactful about myself, but discover there is practically no feeling at all about the war. After all Lebanon is not officially engaged in it. The people I know are all Christian, and they feel themselves in very much the same position as the Jews in the Middle East. A few hundred thousand (about 600,000 surrounded by 40 million Moslems, who hate their guts). They generally feel that there is a slight bond in having another minority just over the border as some slight protection. In 1860 there was an awful pogrom of the Christians here, and the ones left fled to the mountains, and hence most of the people living in the hills are members of the Greek Orthodox church [I think she meant the Maronite Christian church]. There are actually about twenty different sects getting on fairly amicably, including a Jewish community. I had my hair washed by a woman who spoke Russian, and then burst into Yiddish with another customer.

Some things have changed, others have stayed the same. The underlying tensions have continued and, if anything, hardened. And the communities that got along reasonably well have broken out into full-scale combat, especially in Syria. The fighting Lebanon was spared in 1948 has spilled over its borders. Indeed, the links between the Christians and Jews that my mother spotted, took a particularly ugly form in 1982. That was when Israeli forces stood back and let Maronite Christian militia carry out a massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

A deeply moving representation of this terrible event is in the excellent semi-autobiographical Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir. The sense of horror is made somehow even more intense by the film being made as a cartoon. Until the last few scenes, at least.

Leatrice left Beirut on 15 December, after around a month. With many fond memories. As early as in her letter of 16 November, she had written:

Have now seen the cedars of Lebanon. A very lovely tree. Tall, graceful and a very bright green.

What a pity that Lebanon isn’t primarily known for its cedars any more.

And as for the effect of war on a peaceful nation, what more pitiful example could be provided than Syria...

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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Do Jews matter? Or Muslims?

Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis

Denmark, once a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness, has banned the Muslim full-face veil. It also now operates a system of officially designated ghettos, mostly inhabited by immigrants.

The Danish example has animated the far right in Britain, with Boris Johnson, contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, claiming that, while he doesn’t back a ban, he feels the niqab makes women look like letterboxes or even bank robbers.

Many, even Tories, have denounced the ‘morally empty’ Johnson for encouraging Islamophobia in this way. But he has received outspoken support from Jacob Rees-Mogg, from the hard-right, hard-Brexit wing of the Conservatives. That link between Brexit and Islamophobia is no accident: whatever people may say about ‘taking back control’ or Britain assuming its rightful place in the world, the main motive behind Brexit was xenophobia, and the first target of British xenophobia is Muslims.

The rise of xenophobia is creating a toxic atmosphere in which fundamental values of human rights are rapidly receding. We badly need a force capable of resisting that trend, which is why it’s a tragedy that the British Labour Party, far from fighting this crucial battle, has undermined its own position by failing to refute the charges of antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Now, I agree with his fans that the scandal is being sustained by right-wing propaganda against Corbyn and Labour. Where I disagree with them is in seeing this as in any way unprecedented or even unusual. Why, in 1924 the first ever Labour government faced a scurrilous campaign of vilification, including the publication (by the Daily Mail, a sewer then as it’s a sewer now) of a forgery, the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, which suggested that the Communist International was working for a Labour victory.

Attacks on Labour come with the leader’s territory. The hallmark of the leadership is its reaction to them. Sadly, the reaction of today’s leadership has been lamentable.

It could have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, with all its examples, immediately and in full. It didn’t. It decided that four of those examples would have limited its freedom to criticise the state of Israel. It’s hard to see how: nothing in those examples means that one can’t say, for instance, that the Israeli government’s attitude towards Palestinians is racist and abhorrent.

Corbynistas, however, objected to the four examples as a matter of principle. It had to be principle, since pragmatically it was a senseless decision. Ask most British voters about the Israel-Palestine conflict and it’s likely you’ll be met with ignorance. Those who do have an opinion are likely to come up with a ‘faults on both sides’ kind of argument. They might even say ‘well, Israel has to be able to defend itself against terrorists’. Persuading them that Israeli action goes way beyond legitimate action against terrorism would require a long process of education, and I’m not convinced many voters would be prepared to submit to it.

Oddly, though, the rejection of four examples was not, it turns out, a matter of principle after all. Corbyn has now decided that actually he can accept three of the four examples, so clearly they weren’t that problematic to start with. The suspicion has to be that in time he’ll accept the last one too.

Had he done that at the beginning, the attacks would not have stopped, but at least with swing voters he might have been given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Look, he’s accepted the international definition of antisemitism,’ they might have said, ‘and done it immediately. What more can you ask?’

By doing it late and reluctantly, he just looks truculent and unprincipled. He forfeits the credit he might have won otherwise.

Lousy politics.

The implications are more serious than that, however. After all, it isn’t antisemitism that is the most virulent form of racism in Britain today. It is far less widespread or intense than the Islamophobia which permeates society, as exemplified by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s what needs to be resisted before we follow Denmark down the ugly road it has taken.

But how does one resist racism by others when one’s own track record isn’t spotless? Until we’ve cleared ourselves of the charge of antisemitism, Labour can’t claim to lead the fight against racism. Boris may be morally empty, but a counter attack would be far more effective if we’d first secured the moral high ground ourselves.

The toxins run deep. A minority of Labour favours Brexit. Sadly, with his talk of the benefits of a ‘Labour Brexit’, the suspicion is that Corbyn is with that group. That gives it disproportionate power. So it’s unsurprising that the leadership is resisting, despite powerful pressure from the membership, attempts to have the forthcoming Labour Conference debate backing for a second referendum on the EU.

The French equivalent of the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is ‘tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are’. Labour Brexiters are rubbing shoulders with the xenophobes they should be opposing. If they help reinforce racists’ views, they shouldn’t be surprised when they become tarred with that brush themselves. Backing Brexit lands them in the xenophobe camp.

Sadly, while it may only be Jews who are upset with Labour now, it’s Muslims who are facing general hostility. We should be strong in our defence of their rights. And not just for their sake: allow discrimination against the Jews or Muslims today and, who knows, in the long run you too could be the victim of your short-sightedness.

Niemöller adapted to our times

Is Labour really anti-Semitic?

There was a time when to be a British Jew was virtually tantamount to being a Labour Party supporter.

That was the case of the Jewish side of my family. My mother was an active Labourite, working as a secretary to a Labour MP during the Second World War, and true to that loyalty right up to her death at 94 two weeks ago.

Like her, I’ve never voted for any other party, and remain a member to this day.

That makes it sad to see that a breach has opened up between Jews and the Labour Party today. A personal sadness for myself. But also ultimately for the Labour Party itself.

The current conflict focuses on Labour’s refusal to adopt in its entirety the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). Or rather, not to accept all the accompanying examples.

Three Jewish papers express their anger at Labour's stance

As it happens, the IHRA’s text is weakly drafted and open to multiple interpretations. Take this suggested example of anti-Semitism:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

The Labour leadership objects to it because they see it as limiting the freedom to criticise the state of Israel. However, I see no basis for saying it prevents anyone saying that when the Israeli government reduces the rights of its Arab citizens. Nor does it prevent anyone arguing that by doing so, the Israeli government and many citizens are displaying racist attitudes. As they are.

Indeed, it does not even prevent anyone arguing, as I do, that setting up the state of Israel was an error. It has always struck me as way for Americans and Europeans to salve their consciences over Europe’s failure to learn to iive with its Jews. In effect, we said ‘we can’t learn to live with you, so go away and set up your own country, even at the cost of the people living there today.’

Today, though, it’s far too late. The state of Israel exists and is home to about 6.5m Jews. That’s a reality with which anyone trying to argue about Middle East politics simply has to come to terms.

What is it about that example that annoys the Labour leadership? What argument do they feel it limits their right to express? Do they want to protect the freedom to argue that the Jewish population of Israel has no right to self-determination?

Let’s see where that argument would lead in practice. If that population has no right to self-determination, Israel has no right to exist. If it has no right to exist, then it’s legitimate to use force to bring it to an end. And what would happen to the Jews in the region? We would be backing a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Is that a position anyone in Labour really wants to take? I can’t imagine a more clearly anti-Semitic stance.

It makes no difference that Israel, while asserting the Jewish right to self-determination denies it to the Palestinians. The bad behaviour of the Israeli government does not justify Labour backing the use of violence against Israel’s citizens.

Another IHRA example of anti-Semitism to which Labour leaders object reads:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Again, what right are they trying to uphold? Comparisons with the Nazis are the most facile and futile of arguments. Unless a government has deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, the comparison is false. Injustice, collective punishments or excessive force against civilians are shameful crimes that Israel has committed, but so have the US and Britain. Perhaps a parallel with them would make more sense than a comparison with the Nazis.

In any case, why would Labour pay a high political price just to allow some of its members to make so lazy and intellectually weak a case?

Because the price is high. Had Labour simply adopted the full IHRA definition and examples, it would have won itself some credit with the Jewish community. It would have undermined the opponents who are now making mileage from the accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, they have handed their enemies a weapon they could hardly have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

There is, however, another explanation. I’m afraid things turn a bit ugly at this point.

It could be argued that this is all about too little. There are only around a quarter of a million Jews in Britain. Labour could win every single Jewish vote and fail to win an election, or it could lose every single one and still get in.

Besides, though I don’t have statistical evidence for it, my persona experience suggests that British Jews have moved to the right since my mother was young. Like many immigrant communities, they started out on the left while they were poor and oppressed. But as they became prosperous and assimilated, many drifted rightwards.

So maybe there aren’t many votes for Labour to win among the Jewish. How much do they matter to figures in the leadership who suspect them anyway, because of their sympathy for Israel?

The people who matter much more are those traditional Labour voters who, out of xenophobia and delusion that Brexit would benefit them, went over to the far right. That’s why we have the paradox of figures on the left sharing a platform with the hardest nationalists, notably veteran left winger Kate Hoey posing for photo opportunities with Nigel Farage, then leader of the crypto-fascist United Kingdom Independence Party.

After all, there are several million of those voters.

The calculus is easy to follow. On the other hand, many of us in Labour would like to see it being a little more principled than that.

A party that cosies up to the hard right but can’t will make no concessions to show some respect for Jews? That’s not the party my mother and her friends backed in the forties.

How I wish we could get that party back.

A tribute and a denunciation

Bob Wilsker was perhaps the warmest-hearted individual I’ve met. I remember sitting in the back of his car and seeing his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Surrounded by laugh lines, they sparkled with the friendliness that marked him and which said that he saw no strangers, only people he wanted to get to know.

And yet that warmth was in horrifying contrast to the coldness he had experienced as a young adult. A Jew, he had lived in Vienna for over a year under Nazi rule, between Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938 and Bob’s escape to Britain in 1939. One sister escaped with him. His other siblings, his parents, his extended family all disappeared with the vast majority of his community into the slaughterhouse of the Holocaust.

A man almost incapable of bitterness, I heard him make only one truly harsh judgement: of the British officials who would walk down the queue of Jews outside the British consulate in Vienna, offering help for payment. Or, in other words, selling entry visas.

Jews waiting for visas in Vienna
A matter of genuine life and death

Those who never received such visas, like most of Bob’s family, were under sentence of death. And the sentence would be carried out within a couple of years. It has always struck me as one of the most shameful features of British history that our country took so few when so many were in such peril.

The car drive on which I was so struck by Bob’s eyes was to attend a session in a criminal court, where we tried, merely by our presence, to support a young man charged with public order offences for having demonstrated rather too vigorously against Britain’s nuclear weapon policies. Bob was very much a man of the centre-Left, opposed to all forms of racism, to militarisation, to political repression. He was, naturally, a Labour supporter.

Were he still alive today, I think he might have been a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. But he would equally have been demanding that Corbyn move in a great deal more decisive way, and far more rapidly, to extirpate, once and for all, any trace of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

But I think another issue would have shocked him still further. I think he would have found the behaviour of Israel increasingly unbearable. The use of live ammunition against civilian protestors, which led to the death of sixteen Palestinians and the wounding of dozens more would, I’m sure have sickened him.

As would have the sight of Israel preparing to deport political refugees. Many, above all from Eritrea and Sudan, have managed to make it to Israel. Large numbers have been sent to live in south Tel Aviv, much to the unhappiness of the local, Israeli population. Now it looks as though the government may start deporting these unwelcome migrants.

Warm-hearted Bob only showed resentment when he talked about the closed doors that Britain put up to people in peril for their lives. He hated it that some individuals took advantage of that state of affairs to enrich themselves. Above all, he could never accept that it was reasonable to let so many die because we were simply uncomfortable to take them in.

The discomfort was, of course, an expression of what we call xenophobia: dislike of the proximity of those are in some sense different from us.

Those people were Jews. And now the Jewish state is showing the same lack of compassion and fellow-feeling to those who find themselves, today, in the position of the Jews in the 30s. If Britain’s behaviour then was shameful, so is Israel’s today.

I’ll raise a glass to Bob tonight. A remarkable man, a precious friend it was a privilege to know, and a model of decency and openness to others. It makes me more determined than ever to deounce two great evils: antisemitism wherever it appears and its parent xenophobia, whoever is practising it – even if that is a state set up by the survivors of the most vicious and systematic antisemitism the world has seen.