Jews and Palestinians are the losers in this pointless political spat


Finger-pointing over Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to Tunis has now spread to the Tory party. Yet all it does is provoke division

The coffin of an 18-month old child who was killed by IDF, Gaza, Aug 2018 (Mohammed Zaanoun/Activestills.org)

Rachel Shabi writes in the Guardian, “Calls this week for the Conservative peer Lord Sheikh to be expelled from his party, for attending the same Palestinian rights conference as the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2014, are the signs of a row that has spiralled out of control. Like Corbyn, Mohamed Sheikh was at the conference at the invitation of the Tunisian president – though he did not lay a wreath. His attendance has prompted the Tory MPs Zac Goldsmith and Robert Halfon to claim the peer breached the party’s code of conduct.”…

“This week on the BBC’s Today programme, Sheikh, who had gone to the Tunisian conference to speak about the Arab spring and settlements in Palestine, found himself interrogated over the title of the event he had decided to attend: the International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression. The event took place on 30 September 2014. Two months earlier, in July, Israel had begun a 50-day assault on the blockaded Gaza Strip, responding, it said, to rockets fired by Hamas into Israel (though this business of who started what and when is a part of this long and asymmetric Israeli-Palestinian conflict).”…

“It’s hard to see any winners in this sorry mess, but there are clear losers: Palestinians and Britain’s Jewish and Muslim communities, who are forced to endure the hasty, ill-conceived slanging matches that seem to increasingly dominate Britain’s political culture.

In the aftermath of Sheikh’s grilling on the Today programme, the Labour MP Margaret Hodge pitched into Labour’s antisemitism row, which has flared over the summer. In a Sky News interview, Hodge said: ‘It’s a very fine line between being pro-Palestinian and being antisemitic and I think he’s gone the wrong side of that line.’

© Copyright JFJFP 2024