From elected Jewish leader to antisemitism in 1 year?


March 22, 2016
Sarah Benton


Labour’s Jewish leader Ed Miliband, persistently photographed in the most unflattering form. He got slightly more votes from Labour Party members than his equally Jewish brother David.

Labour may not be such a cold house for Jews

Guardian letters
March 21, 201
6

Some years ago, I asked the late, great Jewish actor Miriam Karlin, how, as a youthful Zionist, she had acknowledged the Palestinians. Her response was short: “I am ashamed to say, I never noticed them at all.”

Perhaps what most threatens today’s Zionists is all those Jews who are at the forefront of campaigning for Palestinian rights. Tough to call us antisemites, so they say we are self-hating or desperate to win acceptance by the majority community (criticisms that, by their nature, are almost impossible to refute). Another option, chosen by Jonathan Freedland (Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem, 19 March), is to accuse critics of Israel of ignoring all other examples of international iniquity.

Here countervailing evidence is thicker on the ground. Thus, those at the founding meeting of Jews for Justice for Palestinians 14 years ago represented a roll call of international and domestic activism: Spanish fascism, the Greek colonels, South African apartheid, Vietnam, anticolonialism, Ireland, nuclear weapons, feminism, gay rights, trade unionism, health care, reproductive rights, homelessness… You name it, we were there. And many of us still are – along with new young Jewish critics of Israel’s occupation, who are simultaneously resurrecting Yiddish, supporting Syrian refugees and opposing the bedroom tax.

So, all those passionate campaigners for Israel-right-or-wrong, what else have you fought for since 1948?

None of this negates the need to tackle antisemitism uncompromisingly – and if it is a problem among Labour students (Report, 18 February), it needs rooting out now. But it is a betrayal of every Jew in history who fought for human rights and against oppression, and every Jew ever persecuted for being a Jew, to sling allegations of antisemitism every time anyone tries to stand up for Palestinian rights.

Naomi Wayne
London

• A really interesting question could be asked about why people on the left tend to be more critical of Israel’s policies than those on the right. There is, after all, a Labour Friends of Palestine as well as a Labour Friends of Israel and a Conservative Friends of Israel – but no Conservative Friends of Palestine. Many Greens and Lib Dems also support Palestinian rights. And this is a pattern reflected across Europe. Is it that the left has a more internationalist position, is more critical of Britain’s colonial past and aware of neo-colonialism today? Or has a greater concern for social justice, more empathy, perhaps, with victims of oppression? It was certainly the left that led the struggle against apartheid while the establishment wholeheartedly supported the South African regime.

Hilary Wise
London

• I am a Jew who joined the Labour party after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader. Before that I set up a “Jews for Jeremy” Facebook group, which attracted a large number of like-minded Jews. I have encountered no antisemitism in the Labour party. The isolated cases that were referred to in Jonathan Freedland’s article are actually insignificant in terms of the power these individuals have, and in the case of Gerry Downing (someone I know from my own CLP) more to do with stupidity than antisemitism.

The worst antisemitism I have seen in recent years in connection with the Labour party was that perpetrated by some newspapers during last year’s election campaign, when Ed Miliband’s Jewishness was conflated with classic stereotypes to present him as other and alien. I saw little protest about that at the time from people who now protest at these isolated, trivial examples.

Dr Ian Saville
London

• Jonathan Freedland is right to raise the alarm about Labour and antisemitism. He is also right to say that not all criticism of the state of Israel is necessarily antisemitic, and that some criticism is. But his concern that many Jewish people identify with Israel is irrelevant. My family has lived in Canada for hundreds of years and I strongly identify with my country, but I also tolerate and encourage criticism of our treatment of First Nations and the Japanese during the second world war, among other atrocities that have been committed in my name.

Deborah Cook
Toronto, Canada

• As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor I never stop worrying about how we can make “never again!” meaningful. But as an active member of both the Labour party and my Jewish community, I can say that the assertion that “Labour has become a cold house for the Jews” is simply not borne out by the facts. The party has become a much warmer place for everyone, including Jews, since Jeremy Corbyn was elected. However, some people, inside and outside the party, appear to use allegations of antisemitism to pursue other, political ends.

Sue Lukes
London

• Jonathan Freedland has in the past pointed out that Israel’s policies conflict with Jewish values of regard for the immigrant, love for the neighbour and human brotherhood. The failure to put sufficient pressure on Israel to stop expansion and its oppression of Palestinians is partly caused by America’s insistence on a non-Arab ally in the Middle East and an innate sympathy with settlers. It is a grave disservice not only to Palestinians but also to Israelis not to put pressure on the Israeli state to make these concessions.

Walter Wolfgang
Chair, Labour CND

Unpublished

Jonathan Freedland claims he is not writing a smear, yet both the headline and the text constitute the very smear he denies he is making. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make way for Israel, and all the subsequent horrors for Palestinians, are of course not worth mentioning compared to the far more important matter of two texts by Labour Party members who have now been expelled, and the opportunity to put Jeremy Corbyn and the blood libel in the same paragraph.

Sophie Richmond
London

• Lord Levy warns he could quit Labour over antisemitism, theguardian.com, 20 March). And who can argue with that? Sadly, the inference is that Jeremy Corbyn has not done so. I have been a Labour member for 35 years and haven’t experienced the cancer Levy claims to be exercising his disgust with the party and Corbyn. But haven’t those shown to be guilty been expelled? If there are more, then produce the evidence rather than make general accusations.

It’s hard not to see the origin of this outburst as a continuation of the Blairite faction’s rejection of Corbyn’s legitimacy as leader. For some in the party, to have democratic accountability produce the “wrong” result, prompts the questioning of internal party democracy itself.

Eddie Dougall
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

• I appreciate that a stock photo of “your average British Jew” will make for unremarkable viewing, but the decision to accompany Jonathan Freedland’s article online with a photo of a member of the ultra-Orthodox community (who make up less than 16% of British Jews) just helps reinforce stereotyping of Jews as “other”.

Juliet Stevens
London

The Independent

Corbyn has dealt with antisemitism

I disagree with your editorial (21 March) about “anti-Semitism” in Labour. Corbyn has suspended and expelled those who have voiced anti-Semite views, “Anti-Zionism” and “anti-Israeli government”, both of which I am, are not anti-Semitism. I have nothing against Jews and never will.

You mention a “two-state solution”, but that is just a gimmick for the right-wing Israeli government and media. There will never be a two-state solution under Netanyahu. The problem with Lord Levy, now threatening to quit Labour and a close pal of man of peace Tony Blair, is that he never condemned Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.

Steven Boyle
Middlesbrough


Lord Levy warns he could quit Labour over antisemitism

Labour peer urges leadership to make it ‘absolutely clear’ it will not tolerate antisemitic views

By Rowena Mason, The Guardian
March 20, 2016

Lord Levy, Labour’s former chief fundraiser under Tony Blair, has warned he could quit the party if it does not do more to confront antisemitism.

The Labour peer made the comments amid a row over whether the party had done enough to weed out people who had expressed antisemitic views.

The party has had to take action in recent weeks to re-suspend a former parliamentary candidate, Vicki Kirby, who had made comments about Jews’ “big noses”; expel Gerry Downing, a Labour activist, who had spoken of the need to “address the Jewish question”; and launch an investigation into claims of antisemitism in its youth movement.

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has repeatedly stressed that there is no place in the party for antisemitism.

But Levy told Sky News’ Murnaghan programme that: “Antisemitism in any political party cannot be tolerated and it is for the leadership to make that absolutely clear.

“If they don’t make that clear than I will start to question myself and actually question my being a Labour peer.”

He said he was shocked and horrified by comments that led two activists to face disciplinary action, but added: “It is now up to leadership to make sure that there is a clear and unequivocal message out there that antisemitism in any form will not be tolerated within the Labour party.

“The leadership must come out with that message in absolutely a specific way because from my perspective – being a member of this party – that is of paramount importance to me.”

He continued: “I think one needs to look historically at the Labour party. When I was deeply involved under Tony Blair, this was a party that was very trusted and very loved by the Jewish community and that continued under Gordon Brown and it was certainly the case in the Harold Wilson era.”

A Labour party official said: “Jeremy Corbyn condemns all forms of racism, including antisemitism.”


Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem

Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters

By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian
March 18/19, 2016

As the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is hatred of Jews.

I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.

Start with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God” and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.

Jonathan Freedland, addresses Chatham House on the Israeli election, 2013. 

 

He seems to know more about Israel than he does about Labour Party conferences and leaders.

 

 

It’d be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.

But this is the brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel. Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.

You can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit targets were Jews.

What of those who attack not Jews, but only Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.

But Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then use those terms: they carry much less baggage.

To state the obvious, criticism of Israel and Zionism is not necessarily anti-Jewish: that’s why there are so many Jewish critics of Israel, inside and outside the  country. But it doesn’t take a professor of logic to know that just because x is not always y, it does not follow that x can never be y. Of course opposition to Israel is not always antisemitic. But that does not mean that it is never and can never be antisemitic. As Downing and Kirby have helpfully illustrated.

I hope that, as a result, many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism. I hope they’ll remember that, while most anti-Israel activists are acting in good faith, some are motivated more darkly, while others carelessly express their opposition to Israel in language or imagery that has a melancholy history.

There’s a deeper reason to pause. Many good people on the left want to make things neat and simple by saying that Israel and Zionism have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. That they can deplore the former even while they protect and show solidarity with the latter. But it’s not quite as easy as that.

While many Jews – especially in conversations with each other – condemn Israeli government policy going back many years, they do identify strongly with Israel and its people. A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity. Through ties of family or history, they are bound up with it. When Jews pray they face east – towards Jerusalem. And they have done that for 2,000 years.

It’s inconvenient, I know, but that needs to be remembered by those who insist that there’s no connection between Israel and Jews, that it’s perfectly possible to loathe everything about Israel – the world’s only Jewish country – without showing any hostility to Jews.

Jews themselves usually don’t see it, or experience it, that way. That doesn’t mean no one should ever criticise Israel, for fear of treading on Jewish sensitivities. Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that many Jews worry when they see a part of the left whose hatred of Israel is so intense, unmatched by the animus directed at any other state.

They wonder why the same degree of passion – the same willingness to take to the streets, to tweet night and day – is not stirred by, say, Russia, whose bombing of Syria killed at least 1,700 civilians; or the Assad regime itself, which has taken hundreds of thousands of Arab lives. They ask themselves, what exactly is it about the world’s only Jewish country that convinces its loudest opponents it represents a malignancy greater than any other on the planet?

Which brings us to Jeremy Corbyn. No one accuses him of being an antisemite. But many Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)

Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny.

The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.

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