The left-wing ideologue Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the British Labour Party last year, and it’s been downhill ever since for the vast majority of the country’s Jews — those who are increasingly denounced as “Zionists” because they don’t want to see Israel destroyed.
Whether Corbyn intends it or not, he has created a climate whereby people feel free to voice absolutely egregious opinions, in language that increasingly crosses the line into old-style antisemitism.
This is more than a bit ironic, given that the previous party leader, Ed Miliband, who lost the 2015 election to the Conservatives, was Jewish. And Labour, for that matter, was the political home for a majority of British Jews for many decades.
As late as 1997, 70 percent of the British Jewish community voted for the Labour Party. Today it is less than 25 percent.
Michael Foster, who ran as a Labour candidate in the 2015 general election, recently denounced Corbyn, maintaining that “the Jewish community cannot support a political party that, at its top levels, appears by its inaction to tolerate antisemitic speech and behaviour, from Labour students at Oxford to deputy party chairs in Woking who make crude antisemitic remarks.”
Such people, added Foster, “blend Israel and Zionism into the supposed demagoguery of the classic Jew, an all-controlling malevolent demon, and a rich one, intent on committing incremental genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Yet “Jeremy Corbyn continues to ignore the problem — and that shocks me,” Foster wrote. “He makes no attempt at all to put at ease a Jewish community in Britain that for more than 100 years has supported Labour spiritually, politically and financially.”
The Labour leader’s view that there was “no crisis” over antisemitism in the party “shows only his callousness and contempt for the history of the Jews in Europe.”
Corbyn has a long record of “anti-Zionist” politics and is a longtime supporter of Palestinian causes. He has shared platforms with genocidal terrorists and Holocaust deniers.
As Jamie Palmer wrote in “The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate,” in the April 2016 issue of the Tower, “The horror with which many Jews greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was outstripped only by the realization that his supporters felt that his fondness for the company of antisemites was unworthy of their concern.”
This has given a green light to his supporters to denounce Israel and those who defend it.
A Labour councillor in Luton, Aysegul Gurbuz, has been suspended after a series of antisemitic tweets were found on her Twitter account in early April. She described Adolf Hitler as the “greatest man in history” and she hoped Iran would use a nuclear weapon to “wipe Israel off the map.” Other tweets expressed “disgust” that “Jews are so powerful.”
Mohammed Dawood, another Labour councillor, in the east Midlands city of Leicester, recently tweeted a film showing the burning of the “Zionist entity flag.” On social media, he has described Israelis as “colonizers” and stated that Israeli troops are “Zionist terrorists.”
However, two other party activists were recently readmitted following their suspension for antisemitism.
Gerry Downing had posted a tweet in 2014 referring to what he called “Hamas heroism,” and claimed prominent historian Ian Kershaw had a “Zionist minder.” He also questioned “guilt-tripping over the Holocaust” and spoke about “Zionist money” in his writings. Downing had been excluded from the party but has now been reinstated as a full member.
The Labour Party had also suspended Vicki Kirby pending an investigation into alleged antisemitic comments on social media in 2014. One message claimed Hitler might be the “Zionist God” while another said, “We invented Israel when saving them from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher.”
But she was subsequently not only readmitted but selected as the vice-chair of the Woking Labour Party’s executive committee this past March.
Meanwhile, one of Britain’s premier institutions of higher learning, Oxford University, in February was ordered by Jo Johnson, the British government’s minister for universities, to investigate allegations of intolerance towards Jews.
The university’s Jewish Society released a dossier of eight separate allegations against the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) following the resignation of co-chairman Alex Chalmers, who claimed that “a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”
The club’s committee members were accused of singing a song called “Rockets over Tel Aviv.” A campaign of harassment saw one student facing regular calls of “filthy Zionist.”
More and more, at Oxford and many other universities, one hears the word “Zio” used, not as a shortened reference to a Zionist, but as slang for Jew, the way “Yid” was used by fascists in the 1930s.
Another hotbed of anti-Zionist activity is London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. During its Israel Apartheid Week in February, Rafeef Ziadah, the event chairman, described Israel, which was created in 1948, as “ ’48 Palestine.”
Malia Bouattia, an executive member of the National Union of Students, claimed the government’s attacks on the event were fuelled by “all manner of Zionist and neocon lobbies.”
In June 2015, the Union’s National Executive Council passed a motion to boycott Israel, despite warnings it could alienate Jewish students.
SOAS Jewish Society President Moselle Paz Solis stated she was “too scared to go anywhere” following Israeli Apartheid Week.
Another meeting, in the London School of Economics on March 5, was addressed by Max Blumenthal, a writer who’s the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a past adviser to former President Bill Clinton.
He praised a 2014 massacre carried out by “commandos” of Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, against Nahal Oz, a kibbutz and army base near the Gaza border, saying it was a way for Palestinians to “recover their dignity” and “pop Israel’s security bubble.”
Also in March, the University of Sussex Student Union voted overwhelmingly to implement a full boycott on Israel goods, while the board of the student union at University College London passed a nonbinding motion endorsing the anti-Israel boycott movement.
The measure said, “As students, we have a responsibility towards ensuring that the Palestinians receive and maintain the human rights they are entitled to.”
Prior to the voting, the Friends of Palestine society had organized a series of anti-Israel displays, dubbed the “Palestine Experience,” that included setting up checkpoints at the university that were manned by students dressed as Israeli soldiers.
In a tweet, a representative of the group called the passage “a tremendous victory” at our campus.
Louise Ellman, vice chair of Labour Friends of Israel, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the OULC’s support for Israel Apartheid Week, adding that comparisons between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa “are a grotesque smear.”
But Ellman, the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, has herself been targeted by activists at meetings of her constituency party — reportedly because she is Jewish, according to the Jewish Chronicle.
A small group of activists have attended the sessions specifically to attack her, asking questions only about her position on Israel. One non-Jewish man, who has been a Labour member for more than 40 years, said that when he defended her, he was threatened and told he was a “Zionist fascist.” The level of hate was “terrifying.”
Ellman said some activists were being allowed to “get away” with hate comments online, and called on Corbyn to take action. That prompted his brother, Piers Corbyn, to post a tweet claiming that “Zionists can’t cope with anyone supporting rights for Palestine.”
The Labour Party candidate in London’s mayoral race, a Muslim, recently said he is “embarrassed” and “sorrowful” about his party’s failure to take on antisemitism.
Sadiq Khan, who is of Pakistani descent, told a London Jewish community center on April 5 that Corbyn needs to be “trained about what antisemitism is.” He also criticized the use of the term “Zio” as a slur and noted that antisemitism is “not just a problem for the Jewish community, it is a problem for society.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
