Why did Labour Suspend Corbyn? – Leo Panitch

The new leadership of the British Labour Party has suspended its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, ostensibly for being soft on antisemitism. The real reason is to prove to British and American elites that the party can be trusted on foreign policy. But will this suspension split the party? Leo Panitch The new leadership of the British Labour Party has suspended its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, ostensibly for being soft on antisemitism. The real reason is to prove to British and American elites that the party can be trusted on foreign policy. But will this suspension split the party? Leo Panitch joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't forget there's a donate button at the top of the webpage. Amid accusations that Jeremy Corbyn did not vigorously enough repress or investigate accusations of antisemitism against the Labour Party while he was leader, Corbyn has now been suspended both from the caucus in parliament and from the party itself. Now joining us to give us some context to all of this is Professor Leo Panitch. He's an emeritus distinguished professor of research at York University and is the author of a new book with Colin Leys called, Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn. Leo, explain to us what's happened and then we'll get into why. Leo Panitch Well, this has been coming for some time. The Labour Party agreed when Corbyn was still leader to cooperate with an investigation of the handling of antisemitism in the Labour Party by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which was set up under Tony Blair back in 2007. It was an amalgam of three agencies: The Commission for Racial Equality, The Equal Opportunities Commission and The Disability Rights Commission. But it's mostly existed under the Tories because Labour was defeated in 2010, and it reported that the Labour Party had not treated this problem seriously enough. There were a couple of cases of explicit harassment of Jewish people and [it claimed] that Corbyn's leadership office had obstructed the investigation of some dozens of cases or so. You know, it's hard to know where to begin with this. The commission itself is very poorly funded. Its first chair was very close to Tony Blair. Its current chair is a lawyer who has been very, very close to Israel and the Israeli campaign. That is not to say in any sense that there wasn't a problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party which preexisted Corbin, of course. Although it's not the kind of antisemitism that you think of when you think of swastikas being painted on a synagogue. Or a Jewish cemetery being torn down. It's mainly stuff on Twitter and it reflects intemperate language usually having to do with Zionism. And often the people who are accused of being antisemitic are Jews because there's a long tradition on the Jewish left of seeing the Zionist project as narrowly nationalist, as associated with either British or American imperialism, and of course, most importantly, as dispossessing the Palestinians in their own homeland. But sometimes Zionism is used as equivalent with racism -- "Zionism is a racist project." And even someone like me, a Jew who was brought up in a Labour-Zionist household and went to a Yiddish Labour-Zionist parochial school for my first seven years of schooling, I find that hurtful. Although I understand, and of course I think most people who take these intemperate positions understand, that what this is reallyabout,