WHAT IS THE LABOUR ANTISEMITISM ROW ABOUT?

Hi there.

My name is Nicole and I am an entertainment print journalist. I am also Jewish and I am writing this in response to my many non-Jewish friends who admit they don’t fully understand the Labour antisemitism crisis. I hope it might also help you. I first wrote it in February but it has been updated ahead of the December 2019 election.

The Labour antisemitism issue has been a big problem for around four years now.

In March 2018, for the first time in history, the British Jewish community demonstrated against antisemitism within a parliamentary party; the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn pledged then to ‘do better’.

But the situation has only become much, much worse. Earlier this year nine MPs left the Labour Party citing anti-Semitism as one of the biggest reasons. The equalities watchdog, the EHRC, has also announced an inquiry in the party’s antisemitism complaints saying: ‘We believe Labour may have unlawfully discriminated against people because of their ethnicity and religious beliefs.’ And an episode of Panorama focusing on the issue featured Jewish people revealing the disgusting hatred they had endured and workers from the Labour complaints compartment revealing the Leadership had intervened to ensure some antisemites were not thrown out of the Labour party.

So much for the party of antiracism.

So what is left-wing antisemitism? It isn’t typically what we normally come to think of as racist attacks. They aren’t (normally) screaming ‘Yid’ and drawing swastikas on graves. They aren’t physically attacking us or killing us. But it is insidious and it draws on anti-Jewish tropes which go back hundreds of years and have been used to justify the murder of millions of Jewish people. To understand how and why the Labour Party’s actions under Jeremy Corbyn are so hurtful to me and my community, I’ve written this three part primer explaining what the crisis is about.

Background: What is antisemitism?

Antisemitism, put simply, is hatred of Jews. While Judaism is a religion, Jewishness is an ethno-religion; you can be an atheist and not attend synagogue but still feel genetically, culturally and historically Jewish. And whether you identify yourself as a Jew or not, if you are one, there will be people who will hate you for it.

The word antisemite was popularised in Germany in 1879 as a scientific-sounding term for Judenhass (Jew-hatred). It is also known as the ‘oldest form of hate’. Many elements of antisemitism we still see today are tropes repeated from the birth of Jesus onwards — they are repeated by elected Labour officials — which is why I am going to spend a little time looking at it.

In every generation, antisemitism mutates and new ways are found to express the basic, fundamental principle; hatred of Jews.

One important thing to understand; antisemitism is both similar and different to other forms of racism. Not only are Jews seen as ‘other’ and something dirty and frightening (as in other forms of racism), it is also a racism of envy because Jews are seen as rich, powerful and clever.

Why do people hate Jews? Partly because, up until recently, even in Europe, they were taught to. Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus. Christ Killer was a primary reason for hatred.

These must be a powerful people if they can kill the son of God.

Jews became a wandering people around 2000 years ago when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. Jews were now strangers in other lands and as ‘other’ they were often denied basic rights such as land ownership. They were largely barred from universities and many occupations. One job they could do — because it was illegal for Christians — was money lending. It’s not a job that will make you popular. Hence the many tropes of Jewish bankers and userers who fund and control everything.

Yes Jews did become bankers. The most famous of these bankers are the Rothschilds, a very successful Jewish banking family. Rothschild is a name that is now commonly used as shorthand for Jews — usually to depict how those greedy Jews actually control everything. If you hear the phrase Rothschild/ Zionist Rothschild to describe an evil group of people controlling the world, replace it with Jew. Another contemporary Jewish banker, George Soros, is similarly given the uneasy accolade of controlling the world.

Some extreme versions of antisemitism…

In England in 1144 an English boy was murdered in Norwich and the Jews of the city were blamed, with people saying that it was part of Jewish law to murder gentile children as part of the Passover rituals. This story spread and became known as the blood libel, a charge that Jews like to kill children was repeatedly levelled against Jews across Europe. Nearly 1000 years on. British Jews are still routinely called: ‘lovers of baby-killing’.

Also, in medieval times, Jews were blamed for the Black Death. It was said that they poisoned wells.

Having been thrown out of lands including England, Spain and Portugal, many Jews ended up as part of the Russian empire. If you’ve watched the 1971 film of the musical Fiddler on the Roof, you’ll have an inkling of what happened there. In the late 19th/early 20th centuries, state-sponsored militias burned Jewish villages, killing and raping thousands, and the Jews were thrown out of the lands where they had lived for hundreds of years. These were known as the Pogroms and at least 100,000 Jews died in them. That’s how most of my family ended up in the UK after bundling themselves and their few belongings onto a boat — any boat — out of there.

The pogroms followed the publication of the most insidious piece of literature used to excuse antisemitism: in 1903 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published. This was a fake document created by the Russian leaders purporting to be the minutes of a group of Jews discussing their goal of Jewish global domination by subverting the morals of gentiles (in antisemitic thought Jews are seen as both dangerous sexual beings who want to have sex with your daughters as well as ugly and hook-nosed). These alleged plans were to start wars, control the press and the world’s economies in order to dominate the world. Despite being a fake, it was widely disseminated. Henry Ford, the US carmaker and a notorious antisemite, funded the printing of 500,000 copies alone. It was an inspiration for Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

It is still widely available, particularly in the Middle East, and is a conspiracy theory that even today remains one of the most widely consulted and quoted by notorious antisemites. David Ike is a fan.

Also, around this time came the Dreyfus affair in France, when a French Jewish officer was wrongly accused and imprisoned for the crime of spying, which he did not commit. Solely because of his religion he was considered suspect and accused of dual loyalty — the suspicion that one can’t be a loyal subject and a Jew.

With the pogroms came the movement for Jewish emancipation, which was led by Jewish socialist intellectuals. The Dreyfus Affair showed that in even the most enlightened countries such as France, antisemitism was rampant.

This was a time when many nations, tired of being part of large empires, were clamouring for emancipation.

Like them, these Jews wanted their own land where they no longer had to be second-class citizens. Not all Jews agreed with this — many thought they could stay in their own countries and push for change there, while some groups of ultra religious Jews preferred to wait until the Messiah returned before moving back.

This movement for a national homeland for Jews is called Zionism.

Antisemitism is worse at times of uncertainty. In Germany, in the 1930s, the Nazis used all of the tropes I have described above to create hatred of Jews, and turn them not simply into an underclass but into a rat, a subhuman, who should be killed. They wanted Europe to be Judenrein — free of Jews — and they almost achieved their aim, killing six million of them (there are today just 1.4 million Jews in Europe). There are around 14 million Jews left in the world and 40 per cent of them are in Israel. There are around 300,000 Jewish people in the UK. Even for a minority, we are tiny in number.

The Holocaust is unique in human history because it is the only time a racial group has been systematically murdered on an industrial scale. I say this not to diminish other genocides or slavery. The other point to make about The Holocaust is that it happened in an apparently civilised society — with telephones, cars, planes and films. Just like our world.

It would be nice to think that after the Holocaust antisemitism would have disappeared. But it didn’t. Concentration camp survivors, returning to their homes across Europe, found other people had moved into their houses and their villages didn’t want them back. There were pogroms against the Jews who had survived. Many of them attempted to move to Palestine but were, shockingly and despite all they had been through, turned away by the British authorities which had control over the land the Jews had been promised.

In parts of Europe antisemitism never disappeared and a new form of it — merging with the old forms — took hold in communist countries. These are the origins of a specific left-wing antisemitism. The Protocols of Zion mixed with communist ideology that there should be no religion, no nations; Jews were immediately suspect because they were different. If only becuse of There were a series of show trials with antisemitism at the heart of them. One of the most famous was the Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952. Prosecutors claimed a ‘Zionist-Imperialist’ summit had taken place and the defendants (all hard core communists, all anti-Zionists but the majority of whom happened to be Jewish) were working with America to spy and commit sabotage against Czechoslovakia in exchange for American support for Israel. The trial, once again using the trope of dual loyalty, incited a massive wave of antisemitism across the USSR. Most of this left-wing antisemitism drew on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion bringing in a hatred of Zionism and ‘fifth columnist’ Zionists — ie Jews.

In this nasty antisemitic fantasy, taught in schools across the USSR, Zionism was a global anti-Soviet conspiracy. America — Russia’s enemy — was run by Zionists while Israel was little more than America’s racist, fascist, colonialist proxy in the Middle East. Even Jewish prayer books were banned because they spoke of the ‘children of Israel’ and the dream of, ‘next year in Jerusalem.’ You can still hear these accusations of Zionists being racist, fascist colonialists being used against Jews by Labour antisemites today.

To sum up this historical section, the point I would like to make is that words lead to violence. Antisemitic words always leads to violence against Jews. Jews know just how violent Europeans can get — almost all of us are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust or pogrom survivors — and that is why we are alert when we see antisemitism. We wouldn’t call out antisemitism if it wasn’t there. British Jews tend to be quite meek when it comes to speaking up for ourselves — we don’t often put our heads above the parapet when it comes to our religion. But sometimes things become desperate.

A short note on Israel

Hundreds of books have been written on the Israel-Palestine situation, and most of them don’t agree with each other. Antisemitism is not about Israel but many of the Labour antisemites start by being vehemently anti-Zionist, which is why I’ve put in this little section. I don’t claim to be unbiased and scrupulously impartial, but these are the facts as I see them.

Jews have historical and scriptural ties to what used to be known as the land of Judea (it is where the word Jew comes from). It was renamed Palestine by the Romans once they had banished the Jews. It is a homeland that has never been forgotten. Every year at the Passover meal, for thousands of years, Jews have made the wish, ‘next year in Jerusalem’. There has always been a Jewish community there.

Post-WW1, after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine (at that time a much larger area encompassing what is now Jordan as well as what is now Israel) was a British mandate. In 1917, then Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to the British Jewish community agreeing that Palestine could become a Jewish homeland. The letter said:

‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

Jews did start moving to Palestine — buying up land and creating new cities and villages. But it was hard work for these pioneers and the area was still under the jurisdiction of the British — they weren’t free yet. As Jewish numbers increased, the Arabs who had traditionally lived in Palestine became unhappy and the Brits put strict quotas on immigration numbers. There was violence on both sides and pogroms against the Jews including the 1929 Hebron massacre.

As antisemitism grew in Germany and across Europe, boatloads of Jews were turned away from Palestine by the British authorities who needed the help of their Arab allies against the growing Nazi menace. Borders were closed to these Jews all over the world. They were sent back to Europe and to their deaths.

Some key dates in Israel’s history…

1947

After the Holocaust there was a consensus that the Jews needed their own homeland for safety. (This is one reason why antisemites are keen to play down and deny the Holocaust.) The UN adopted a controversial carved-up partition plan for Palestine (in which the UK was one of the few Western nations to abstain rather than agree) granting an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state. Jerusalem was meant to be under the jurisdiction of the international community. This happened amid a backdrop of increasing violence between the Jewish and Arab community as Jewish immigration (both legal and illegal) continued. The Jews accepted the UN partition plans, the Arabs turned them down.

May 1948

The British pulled out of Palestine. Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq invaded Palestine to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. After a year of fighting there was a ceasefire. The Arab countries grabbed what they could; Jordan took the West Bank (this area is called the West Bank because it is on the West Bank of the Jordan River although it is in the east of Israel) and East Jerusalem (the home of the Western — or Wailing — Wall, as well as many Arab villages) and Egypt took the Gaza strip.

Some 700,000 Palestinians fled and were expelled from their lands during the war — this became known as the Nakba (the catastrophe). Around156,000 of them remained and Arabs now make up 20 per cent of Israeli society.

At the same time, around 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands and were forced to become refugees in Israel. While Jews once had a rich history in Arab lands there are now almost no Jews in any Muslim states.

Meanwhile, having taken Jerusalem, Jordan expelled all the Jews from its new territory and tore up Jewish graveyards.

1967 The Six Day War

Arab-Israeli relations had deteriorated with Arabs trying to cut off Israel’s water supply and calling for the country’s destruction. Forces massed on Israel’s borders. Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. In an unexpected victory, taking just six days, the Israeli army had captured the West Bank, the Gaza strip, part of the Sinai Peninsula and, in the north, the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel now had, under its jurisdiction (especially in the West Bank and Gaza) large groups of angry Arabs/ Palestinians. This sowed the seeds for the trouble we still see and heralded the start of the age of Palestinian Liberation Organisation — PLO — and terror against Jewish targets across the world.

These attacks included the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by a terrorist group called Black September.

When people talk about the ‘green lines’ or 1967 lines they are talking about what was the status quo prior to the Six Day War.

1973 The Yom Kippur War

Arab forces from Egypt and Syria launched a joint attack on Israel, which was successfully repelled but only after the loss of many lives.

1977 Israelis vote in a right-wing government and Jewish ‘settler’ movements into the occupied West Bank begins.

1978/9 Israel signs a peace agreement with Egypt which sees Israel returning the Sinai Peninsula areas it had won in 1967.

1980s & 1990s

New waves of Jewish immigrants come from Ethiopia and the now crumbling USSR (1million of them) which previously had made it almost impossible for Jews to leave for Israel.

1987 With hardening attitudes on both sides, the Palestinians unleashed the First Intifada, sanctioning terror attacks to demonstrate against Israeli rule.

1992 The Oslo Accords

The PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist and pledged to end the terror campaign. Israel gave the PLO the right to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But there was anger from extremists on both sides including the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. This was followed by a spate of terror attacks by the Palestinians.

2000 Camp David Summit

The Israelis offered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with parts of Jerusalem but the talks broke down because they could not agree on the status of the holy parts of Jerusalem or the ‘right of return’, with Palestinians (now numbering more than four million from the 700,000 who had left 50 years earlier) demanding their right to return to Israel. This was followed by the Second Intifida which saw more than 1000 Jews killed in terror attacks; that in itself created a hardening public opinion against the Palestinians.

2005 Israeli settlements forcibly removed from Gaza by the Israeli government. Palestinians given rights over the Gaza strip but Israel controlled most of its borders — apart from the one with Egypt — its airspace and territorial waters. In the same year the West Bank barrier wall was built to stop terrorist attacks on Israel (it has largely been successful in that point of view) but also creating more barriers for Palestinians to enter into Israel.

2007 In elections in Gaza, Hamas, a movement that has vowed to destroy Israel and cleanse it completely of Jews, won. It is regarded as a terrorist movement by the United States and European Union (including Britain) and is still intent on war with Israel.

2012/ 2014/ 2018 and continuing to this day; Hostilities between Gaza and Israel. Border skirmishes with Gazans trying to breach the border to claim their right of return and attack Jewish villages — Israelis respond with force killing hundreds of Gazans.

In the meantime, Israel pursues the normalisation of relations with Arab states, including Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and they make common cause against their mutual enemy Iran.

Is Israel an apartheid state?

No, it is not comparable to South Africa’s treatment of its black majority which was denied education, housing and a vote. Israel’s 20 per cent of Arab citizens are granted the same rights as Jewish Israelis. They are judges, MPs and so on, and they share the same beaches and hotels. While anti-Zionists see Jews as white and Arabs as brown in order to continue this false narrative, they are actually the same colour & almost impossible to tell apart (more than half of Israel’s Jews have never lived in Europe). Within Israel proper, the biggest distinction is that only Jews are granted the ‘right of return’ to Israel. This is in order to guarantee its majority Jewish state and its status as a safety raft for diaspora Jews fleeing persecution. Israeli Arabs do not have the right of return.

In the West Bank (under Fatah) and in Gaza (under their rivals Hamas) Palestinians have a degree of self-governance but they are ultimately under Israeli control in terms of movement. They are an occupied people without the same rights as people living in Israel and, in the West Bank, they have a fractious violent relationship with the settlers. To complicate matters Fatah, which has a better relationship with Israel, and Hamas are fierce enemies. Neither of these territories have had an election for more than a decade.

Sadly (but rarely mentioned), the situation is even worse for the Palestinians in Arab lands. Many of them are still in tented refugee camps. In 2001, for example, in Lebanon, Palestinians were stripped of the right to own property and were banned from working as doctors, lawyers and 20 other professions. Palestinians are the only group of people in the world who inherit refugee status (the aim normally is to resettle refugees).

One more thing about the erroneous apartheid analogy. It attempts to pit Jew against black. Traditionally, as minorities, we have often been allied. But there is a growing new trope which pits the Jew as a white colonialist against the black or brown indigenous Palestinian. The idea that Jews were involved in the slave trade is part of that whole tradition. In this intersectional day and age Jews are considered to have white privilege. It is true that many of us are ‘passing white’ (although there are black Jews, Indian Jews, Asian Jews and of course all the Middle Eastern Jews), but once people are aware of our background or our religion that advantage often changes. We are still Jews. Perhaps even worse, we are sneaky Jews, fifth columnists; secretive beings who don’t actually look any different but are there under false pretences.

What is the Two-State Solution?

This is the idea that eventually the Oslo Accords will translate into action and become reality. There will be a peaceful Palestine and Israel living side by side and this is, I believe, the hope of the majority of Israelis and Palestinians who have now been at war for 70 years. But as time goes by and the two sides become entrenched in hate, people are beginning to doubt this will ever happen.

Labour antisemitism

If you are still reading, well done. Reward yourself with a cup of tea and a biscuit. We’ve finally got to the relevant bit. Phew. Having the background will, I hope, help you to make sense of what this horrendous row is about.

Overview

Labour antisemitism merges all of the old tropes (also known as ‘dog whistles’ , essentially coded language) — baby killer/ rich cabal/ control of the media and government/ greedy bankers with a fierce strain of anti-Zionism. In the 1900s, if you were an anti-Semite, you might have called a Jew a ‘Christ-Killer’. In the 1920, it would have been ‘a kike’. In the 1970s, when I was growing up, we were ‘yids’. Now we are called: ‘apartheid-loving, kid-killing Zio-Nazis’. ‘Zio’ for short.

Being an anti-Zionist does not necessarily mean you are antisemitic but the two frequently bleed into each other. Technically, being an anti-Zionist means you don’t believe in Zionism which means you don’t believe Jews should have a homeland. The question is then raised — would you deny any other oppressed indigenous group the right to their own homeland?

Being a Zionist doesn’t mean you can’t also be pro-Palestinian. Many Zionists I know also campaign on behalf of Palestinians.

Being antisemitic does not help the Palestinians one jot. Being pro Palestinian doesn’t mean you have to be anti-Zionist.

This question over Zionism became one of the key subjects of the much-debated problem of the IHRA definition of antisemitism that rocked the Labour Party in the summer of 2018. Even in the dying moments of the debate, Jeremy Corbyn was still arguing over one of the key points of the definition. He insisted: ‘It should not be considered antisemitic to describe the circumstances around [Israel’s]foundation as racist’. In other words, he still wanted to argue against one of the definitions. He wanted to be able to describe Israel as a racist endeavour. The day after Labour passed the IHRA definition, posters went up all over the country saying, ‘Israel is a racist endeavour.’

Racist endeavour. This is not the same as saying Israel is a racist country. It is saying that the very existence of Israel, as a Jewish state, is racist. You might think it is. You might not agree with the idea of any religious states. The rebuttal to that is; would you say the same about Pakistan, which was set up, around the same time, via partition, to be a Muslim state? Jeremy Corbyn has never wanted to call any other state a racist endeavour. The idea that the actual existence of Israel is racist is one of the cruxes of Labour’s problems. And if you think the idea of Israel is racist, the next step is to say Zionists are racist. And if you think Zionism is racism, then you think 90 per cent of British Jews, who identify as Zionists or at least believe in the state of Israel, are also racist. You see the problem?

It is easy to be pro-Palestinian without being antisemitic. You can call the Israeli government evil racists — if you feel you must — as much as you want without being antisemitic. You can Israelis and the settler movement racist scum if you insist (although I would argue for some nuance as many Israelis fight against the situation). Just don’t call them Nazis.

Another of the controversial points of that IHRA definition is, just, that you should not use Nazi analogies when describing Israel. Presumably it is clear why comparing a Jewish state to the people who killed six million of their co-religionists is deeply and deliberately hurtful. Israelis aren’t Nazis; the two situations have nothing in common. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting over land; the Nazis wanted to kill the Jews because of their race.

The third point in this overview, if we are talking about the IHRA definition and why it proved so difficult for Corbyn to agree to, is the idea that Israel is demonised above and beyond all other nations. You can call the Israeli government racist, you can describe them as evil monsters for the way they treat the Palestinians — but would you attribute the same level of criticism about any other controversial countries? Would you demand a boycott any other of these nations? Would you hate every Pakistani (to use that analogy again) even if you hate Pakistan? If not, why is the only Jewish state in the world the one you pick out to hate more than any other? Why are Jewish Israelis the only people in the world you demonise?

Labour Antisemitism In Detail

I’ve nearly finished, I promise. I am not going to write about every incident of Labour anti-Semitism because that would take this blog post into a book-sized length. I will concentrate on some key points. For ease, I am dividing this into three parts which intertwine.

Jeremy Corbyn

His Jewish MPs think he is an antisemite. Some 85 per cent of British Jews think he is antisemitic. If you were to give him the benefit of doubt you could say the Leader of the Labour party is so blind to left-wing antisemitism that he would not see it if it slapped him on the face, stamped on his face and screamed in his ear, ‘THIS IS ANTISEMITIC’. Of course, he does see antisemitism when the Far Right is at fault. He just doesn’t believe that the Labour movement can be racist, he doesn’t believe he has a racist bone in his body so, by that strange logic, he can’t possibly be antisemitic. Presumably the conclusion to these deluded thoughts is that those grasping, Tory-supporting, capitalist, Zionist Jews, who don’t like his pro-Palestinian views must be making it up. This train of thought is called the Livingstone Formulation, coined by antisemitism expert David Hirsh and based on Corbyn’s great friend and former London mayor Ken Livingstone. Livingstone claims that as he is not an antisemite (despite the antisemitic things he has done see below) all the accusations of antisemitism must be a smear.

Jeremy Corbyn has for years been entrenched in the extreme anti-Zionist wing of the Labour party. It’s meant he’s had some audiences with some notorious Jew-haters from the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe his, ‘I was there but not involved’ answer when it came to whether or not he laid a wreath on the grave of the person who organised the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; it all fits a pattern. If you are a Jew-hating terrorist, or any kind of high profile antisemite, you’ve probably met Jeremy Corbyn and you might even be friends with him.

This extreme brand of anti-Zionism numbers some pretty vile conspiracy theorists who blame Israel, Jews, The Mossad as behind all of the evils of today including ISIS. One example is former vicar Stephen Sizer. He got in trouble with the church for saying that Israel was responsible for 9/11. Jeremy Corbyn defended him.

And while Corbyn may claim he is only against Zionists, not Jews, for the reasons I hope I’ve outlined above, most Jews are Zionists in the technical sense. So, when a video emerged of him saying about Zionists; ‘Zionists have no sense of English irony despite having lived here all their lives’ this indicated what he thought of Jews. Jews are different. They aren’t really English.

Corbyn uses the same kind of all powerful/ dark forces tropes we have seen throughout history about the Rothschilds etc when he blames things on the ‘Zionist lobby’. For example, when Hamas hate preacher Sheikh Raed Salah was banned from Britain for using the blood libel that Jews drink the blood of children, Corbyn was incensed. Corbyn regarded Salah as ‘a very honoured citizen’ and he was furious that what he called, ‘the Zionist lobby’ had stopped his great mate taking tea with him in the House of Commons.

It is clear that Jeremy Corbyn is not the kind of person Jews are going to love as a possible Prime Minister. But the community would not have demonstrated — we would not be at this crisis point — if he was the only problem.

Antisemitic members, MPs and councillors

So, you’ve got a leader who — at best — is friends with a lot of antisemites. As a result journalists and campaigners started looking at what Labour officials, councillors, MPs and the people around Jeremy had said about Jews. One of the early people caught in this net was the then-new Bradford MP Naz Shah. Her Twitter feed had a message on it which said, ‘Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict — relocate Israel into United States.’ Forcibly move Jews out of Israel? Red alert. Other posts emerged showing she had compared Israel to the Nazis and said, ‘the Jews are rallying.’

To her credit, Shah quickly apologised but that wasn’t good enough for Ken Livingstone. He decided that the best way to defend Naz was to go on the attack. ‘Hitler,’ he said, ‘was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.’ Hitler wasn’t a Zionist. He always hated Jews and didn’t want a strong Jewish state. He just wanted Europe free of Jews. Ken was suspended but, two years later when the Jewish community protested because of a lack of action on antisemitism, he was still officially a member of the party.

Here’s another one. And it shows the contempt that certain people within the party hold the Jewish community in.

A Peterborough council candidate Alan Bull had posted on Facebook an article headlined; ‘International Red Cross report confirms the Holocaust of 6m Jews is a hoax.’ It had taken two fellow Labour councillors more than a year to get Labour officials to even look at this blatant Holocaust denial (they have both since left the party, I believe). Christine Shawcroft was the chair of Labour’s disputes panel.

On the day after Jews had demonstrated about Labour antisemitism, she looked at the Holocaust denial and saw nothing wrong with it. She said he did not need to be reprimanded and should be allowed to represent Labour on the council. There was a fuss in the media. (These scandals only get looked at when there is a fuss in the media.) She lost her job, but she remains a director of Momentum. She also claims the row has been ‘stirred up to attack Jeremy.’

This is a common response — don’t say sorry but attack the victims of the racism and say it is all a smear. What this attitude had led to is yet more antisemitism. Jeremy’s fans believe that those dastardly capitalist Zionist Jews have made all of this up. And they feel emboldened to be more antisemitic. It feels like it has become a war. It’s pretty depressing.

Is it true that the anti-Semitism row has been used to attack Jeremy Corbyn? Yes. But that’s what happens in politics. Political rivals would not be able to use the antisemitism row to attack him if he had nipped in the bud. But after four years he still hasn’t nipped it in the bud; in fact the problem is now much larger.

Here’s a just a couple a few examples (to find more please look at Alan Johnson’s excellent Fathom publication or find Labour Against Antisemitism and GnasherJew on Facebook and Twitter).

• After the new Independent group — many of whom left Labour citing anti-Semitism — were set up, a Labour MP, Ruth George, suggested that they were being funded by Israel. Those controlling Jews, eh?
• NEC member Peter Willsman was recorded at a NEC meeting saying that accusations of Jewish, ‘Trump fanatics making up duff information.’ He attacked 68 rabbis who had written a letter to the party protesting about antisemitism. ‘We should ask these rabbis…where is your evidence?’ Those Jews are just making it up because they have loyalty elsewhere. Willsman was later recorded saying the antisemitism crisis had been created by the Israeli government.
• Labour councillor Dave Oldfield from North Lincolnshire tweeted the antisemitism scandal, ‘must be a M15 Tory government plot to cause havoc in our party.’
• Other Labour councillors found to have spread antisemitism online included:

1. Andrew Slack who wrote, ‘What they are doing to the Palestinian people now is EXACTLY what they intend for the world’ illustrated with a far right caricature of a ‘hook-nosed Jew’ with his hands soaked in blood.
2. Aysegul Gurbuz in Luton who praised Hitler as, ‘the greatest man in history’ adding, ‘it’s disgusting how much power the Jews have in the US.’
3. Damien Enticott in Bognor who wrote, ‘Hitler had a point’ and Zionists ‘should be put in concentration camps’.
4. Deborah Golding in Norfolk who was a Holocaust denier
5. Ilyas Asis who urged Jews to, ‘stop drinking Gaza’s blood.’
6. John Clarke from Essex wrote Jewish Holocaust victims should have, ‘fought back’ and the Rothschilds have ‘used usury as an imperial instrument ot take over the world and all of its resources.’

(For a much fuller look up Gnasher Jew on Twitter which has dozens more like this).

And it is not just online Luciana Berger, the Jewish MP who left the party citing anti-Semitism, has described incidents much worse than things on social media. She received daily death threats and had to have a police escort at the Labour party conference. Her constituency party attempted to de select her because she had spoken out against Labour antisemitism. How did the, ahem, anti racist Labour leadership react to this bullying? John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, suggested that she should profess her commitment to Jeremy Corbyn if she wanted the abuse to stop. It later turned out that the chairman of her Labour branch, Dr Alex Scott-Samuel, had made repeated appearances on a current affairs show broadcast by conspiracy theorist David Icke. Icke believes in Holocaust denial and the ‘global conspiracy Rothschild-Zionism’.

I guess at this point we might as well talk about Chris Williamson. A week after Luciana and others left the party over anti-Semitism and the leaders promised that, yes, THIS TIME, they really will sort out this problem, Williamson, one of Corbyn’s closest allies and an extreme Jew-baiter managed to behave in ways that showed just how rotten to the core Labour has become when we are talking about Jew-hatred.

First, we have to rewind a bit and talk about Jackie Walker. She also comes from the Momentum family (Momentum is the army within an army set up to mobilise the far left which won Corbyn his two leadership elections). She has a Jewish father (that doesn’t make her Jewish according to tradition which goes down the line of the mother but would mean she could move to Israel as she had Jewish parentage). She’s part of a gang with quite a few extremist anti-Zionist Jews/ people with Jewish blood who provide a cover for Jeremy Corbyn.

They are called the ‘As a Jews’ — as in ‘As a Jew I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn has a racist bone in his body’. Officially their group is called Jewish Voice for Labour and several of their members have, at one stage or another, been suspended by Labour for antisemitism. (Strange as it may seem, some of the most notorious anti-Semites in history are actually Jewish. That’s a whole other subject.)

She was suspended from the Labour party in 2017 for, among other things, describing Jews as being, ‘among the chief financiers of the slave trade’ (not true), questioning whether Jewish schools needed extra security (this security comes because of Home Office advice) and saying Holocaust Memorial Day should be for all people who have experienced holocaust (there was only one Holocaust which affected not just Jews but also Roma and gays — also victims of other genocides are already remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day).

She was still a suspended member but earlier this year Williamson (who has regularly stood on platforms with her and other people suspended or thrown out of the party for anti-Semitism) announced he would be hosting the screening of her new film. It is based on her show about how she is ‘persecuted’ by the Jewish community for ‘speaking the truth’.

In the same week, Williamson told a Momentum meeting that the Labour party has been ‘too apologetic’ on the issue of anti-Semitism. He was cheered for saying that. HE WAS CHEERED BY LABOUR PEOPLE AS HE DENIED SELF-EVIDENT RACISM. He was forced into an apology (his third apology for Jew-baiting) and finally, as it looked like some more Labour MPs might desert the party, the whip was removed. Williamson seems to have forgotten about his apology — he now claims: ‘I’ll work to clear my name.’

It later emerged that at another CLP he had claimed that ‘dark forces’ were using their ‘contacts in the media’ to ‘undermine’ the Labour party.

Not only was he cheered (again) but following the removal of the whip several Labour organisations pledged their support of him. In Hackney North, home of one of the biggest Jewish communities in the country, at a meeting attended by the supposedly anti-racist MP and shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, a motion was passed which said: ‘We call upon the NEC [National Executive Committee] to release a statement firmly rejecting the accusation that Labour is in any way ‘institutionally racist’ making it clear that Labour and its current leader have a proud record of fighting racism.’ Diane said nothing.

And this denial and idea of smear has become an issue in itself. Even as Jeremy Corbyn and others in the leadership team admit the party has an antisemitism problem, they not only do nothing about it, but they play on the idea that it is a smear. They encourage the Jew-baiting of Chris Williamson and others who say that the whole thing has been exaggerated by critics of Corbyn — even as they vow to stamp out the very real issue.

And for people who know nothing about antisemitism, have never met a Jew, are confused by the row they begin to believe it really is a smear — perhaps one created by Mossad. And thus a new army of antisemites are radicalised, parroting the lines they have been fed by people in the leadership team who know better.

Chris Williamson, denied the chance to become a Labour MP (but still not thrown out of the party) finally left it in November 2019. His resignation letter reading like a manual of antisemitism, blamed, ‘apartheid apologists apparently influencing Labour foreign and domestic policy’ on his demise in the party.

Institutional racism

Labour is an institutionally racist party. That does not mean everyone in Labour is racist — far from it. I know lots of people in Labour who are rightly appalled by racism in their party.

But institutional racism means the apparatus, the leadership, the people who are meant to be in charge, are racist. This is an important distinction because a lot of people in Labour — a lot of good people who are not anti-Semitic — have gone on the defence. They feel they are being accused. They are not.

To date, the campaign group Labour Against Anti-Semitism has put in complaints of about more than 1000 individual members of the party. The EHRC was sent a 15,000 page document documenting this. One of the reasons for the Labour split earlier this year came when Labour’s general secretary refused, despite the demands of MPs, to divulge exactly what had happened to all of those complaints. She came back simply with a sample figure of ten months. Out of more than 600 cases she had looked at there were just 12 expulsions. Tom Watson, the party’s former deputy leader (he has now resigned), asked her to look again at some of the people she didn’t throw out of the party.

These are some of the tweets that didn’t warrant any punishment: ‘Jews murder people and children.’… ‘don’t know what runs through Jews veins, not human blood’ and ‘Jews’ hearts and brains are totally devoid of humanity.’

Over the last few months, and as it was made clear in the Panorama documentary, it emerged that people who worked for Jeremy Corbyn had interfered in antisemitism cases despite the fact the complaints department was meant to be free from political interference. The Leader’s office — which is meant to be distinct from the disciplinary part of the party (which is not meant to be political) — interfered in more than 100 cases. Members who wrote, ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘Fuck the Jews’, said Jews were behind 9/11 and called Jewish MPs Zionist infiltrators were not deemed worthy of punishment by the Labour leadership.

Please let that sink in, because it truly is shocking.

But the shocks continue. Over the last few weeks we have seen that a number of people being chosen to become Labour MPs have one thing in common; a hatred for Israel which frequently trips into antisemitic tropes.

Zarah Sultana, chosen for Coventry South, said she would ‘celebrate’ the deaths of Tony Blair and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and said she supported ‘violent resistance’. She also used the racial slur YT (whitey) against a Jewish student who was applying to be a BAME officer saying: ‘I can’t believe this YT thinks she can represent us.’

Kate Ramsden had to stand down from representing the Scottish seat of Gordon when it emerged she’d likened the actions of Israel to a child abuser.

The candidate for Clacton, Gideon Bull also had to stand down when it emerged he had called a Jewish councillor ‘Shylock’. He remains a Labour councillor.

Meanwhile the candidate chosen to fight Boris Johnson, Ali Milani, has apologised for writing a series of antisemitic comments on twitter when he was a teenager including the slur: “Nah u won’t mate it will cost you a pound #jew”. On another occasion, he wrote: “So lecturer asks the class today ‘nobody in this room would ever want to go to war right?’ My hand rises. ‘Who?’ Me: ‘Israel’.”

And Claudia Webbe, chosen to replace Keith Vaz in Leicester East, said that antisemitism allegations were an example of how the, ‘combined machinery of state, political and mainstream elite join together without any regard to victims to make false allegations.’

Meanwhile at a rally in a church Labour leadership favourite Laura Pidcock took things one step further — perhaps to their inevitable conclusion. The daughter of a former Catholic priest she evoked the death of Christ (using words from the bible from his crucifixion)— something used to punish Jews for over two millennia — when alluding to the antisemitism row, saying: ‘I know we are on the path towards justice. I know because Jeremy Corbyn might become PM they will throw everything at us. They will say some really hurtful things. Forgive them. For they know not what they do.’

This is an organisation determined to make out the Jews are pretending the antisemitism we can all see isn’t there.

By not punishing antisemitism, the party is encouraging it. It feels like it is open season on Jews. I’ve been accused of being paid to troll by Israel, I’ve been called a white supremacist, I’ve been put on a list of ‘paedophiles’ and I’ve fallen out with friends who refuse to see how all of this is not right.

I could go on but I’m tired and I’m scared. Like many Jews, I don’t want to be writing about antisemitism. I never thought I would have to write about contemporary antisemitism or that I would have to explain to my children that even today people don’t like us because we are Jewish. I never thought I would be having conversations with friends about what we would do, where we would go, if Jeremy Corbyn ever became Prime Minister. I’m heartbroken. And I’m bloody furious that no one seems to be able to stop this open season on me and my community.

• For further reading I suggest looking at the Twitter feeds or social media feeds of Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS), GnasherJew or the Campaign Against Antisemitism. Good books include Dave Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism and David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism.