The conflict between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana that has been simmering since Sultana resigned from the Labour Party in July has exploded into the open with Sultana creating a membership portal for Your Party, Corbyn threatening legal action as a consequence and Sultana warning she might sue for defamation. Although apparently about organisation, in reality the dispute is about political strategy. Corbyn wants a party which is no more than a left outrider to the Labour Party. That means he and his coterie must keep a tight control over Your Party’s politics to maintain their alliance with the four MPs elected in 2024 on a pro-Gaza standpoint, and with the remnants of the left in the Labour Party itself. Sultana recognises that this will doom Your Party to irrelevance, as it will lose the support of a younger generation who instinctively understand that the Labour Party is hopelessly reactionary. That is why unlike Corbyn she says that ‘Labour is dead’.
Sultana’s unilateral announcement back in July that she and Corbyn would be co-leading the new party had upset Corbyn’s faction as it bounced them into the process of creating a new party before they were ready to exert full control. Since then, Corbyn’s allies from his years as leader of the Labour Party, in particular his former chief of staff Karie Murphy and retired Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, have manoeuvred to exclude Sultana and her supporters from involvement in key decisions. On 18 September, Sultana tried to cut the Gordian knot by creating a portal for registering Your Party membership; Corbyn and the four Independent MPs in his camp immediately issued a statement denouncing the step, threatening legal action, and urging potential members to ignore the portal and cancel any direct debits they might have set up. Corbyn’s faction then self-reported the party to the Information Commissioner’s office.
It is not just on the question of the Labour Party that Corbyn and Sultana’s political views diverge: critically for today, it is also over Palestine. Sultana has asserted very publicly that she is an anti-Zionist, claiming that ‘anyone who understands what settler-colonialism is will find themselves also identifying as an anti-Zionist.’ Corbyn has equally publicly contradicted this, complaining further that Sultana ‘didn’t need to go that far’ with her declaration. As Labour leader in 2018, Corbyn had attempted to appease his reactionary Zionist critics by stating that ‘non- or anti-Zionist Jews’ and those ‘in the Zionist tradition’, were both part of ‘traditions [that] have always had honourable proponents in our movement.’ (The Guardian, 3 August 2018) In the same article, he drew out the consequences of defending ‘honourable’ Zionism with a declaration that ‘Labour supports a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. That means an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the creation of a Palestinian state, alongside the state of Israel, with both states living in peace and security.’ For years, most of the left has deliberately obscured Corbyn’s reactionary defence of the Zionist colonial-settler state’s right to exist while eulogising his supposed support for the Palestinian people.
Now Sultana has exploded this myth, stating in an interview with New Left Review in August that Corbynism ‘capitulated to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which famously equates it with anti-Zionism’, and arguing that ‘when [the Labour leadership] came under attack from the state and the media, it should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies. But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory.’ Her attempts to exculpate Corbyn from direct responsibility rang hollow as she complained of ‘a small number of people who are involved in the party have engaged in anonymous briefings, making hostile and implicitly Islamophobic comments about me to the Sunday Times and Sky News…People who are supposedly on the left thinking it’s appropriate to use the Murdoch press to broadcast smears is astounding’. It was quite clear she was targeting the Corbyn faction.
Corbyn’s reputation had already suffered with his long-standing refusal to commit to a new party and more recently by his alliance with the socially reactionary Independent MPs. One of them, Adnan Hussain, has expressed transphobic views, calling for ‘women-only’ spaces, and another, the businessman Shockat Adam, has spoken up in defence of landlords. Sultana responded directly to the former at a rally in south London on 12 September: ‘Let me be clear, trans+ rights are human rights and we will defend them.’ Sultana is clearly pitching a more radical set of politics to appeal to a new generation of activists, whereas Corbyn’s supporters are mostly elderly former members of the Labour Party. Their bureaucratic, top-down approach to political organisation and their opposition to any form of anti-imperialism will alienate younger supporters of Your Party.
Sultana has yet to spell out what her anti-Zionism means in practice – and the devil lies in the detail. For instance, in December 2023, she said she would not ‘deny or downplay Hamas’s appalling attack on 7 October, when 1,200 people – the majority civilians – were killed. I condemn that attack once again, as I have done repeatedly in the Chamber, and call again for the release of all hostages’. It was a view she repeated in Parliament on the anniversary of the Al Aqsa Flood operation when she confirmed that ‘I’ve repeatedly condemned the October 7 attack.’
Yet she cannot simultaneously hold two contradictory positions – on the one hand, proclaiming her support for anti-Zionism, while on the other, condemning those leading the fight against Zionist terror, the armed resistance in Palestine. And when she says that Your Party ‘will fight for a free Palestine, a secular state with equal rights for all’ does she mean it will reject any notion that the Israeli state has any legitimacy whatsoever, and therefore any right to self-defence? There would be strong opposition to these views from the Corbyn clique: the leadership of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War in particular, and the trade union leadership which bankroll these campaigns. They share the position of Corbyn and the Labour Party, either implicitly or explicitly conceding a bogus legitimacy to the colonial-settler state through their acceptance of a two-state solution.
More and more people will see that Corbyn’s sanctimonious phrases are window dressing for a hopelessly reactionary standpoint. Sultana has yet to state openly that Zionism is racism even though it is implicit in being anti-Zionist, but Corbyn rejected the equivalence back in 2018 and has not recanted. The equation of Zionism with racism is of course completely accurate, and the UN General Assembly had agreed thus in 1975. US imperialism then spearheaded the drive to overturn the resolution, US President George Bush Snr in 1991 personally moving its rejection at the UN stating that ‘To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel’s right to exist.’ To state that Zionism is racism is precisely to challenge Israel’s right to exist, and to cast it as an imperialist creation. Corbyn wants Your Party to remain politically tied to Labour and to British imperialism on the question. Sultana must decide how far she is prepared to pursue these political differences now that her split with Corbyn is out in the open.
Robert Clough
