UK election 2024: Labour’s non-Zionist Jews complain of ‘disdain
Former civil servant Jenny Manson, co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour
Imran Mulla reports in Middle East Eye on 1 July 2024:
The Labour Party is on the cusp of taking power and its leader Keir Starmer is set to become prime minister. One of the defining features of his leadership has been his insistence that Labour is cracking down on antisemitism.
“We’ve been ruthless in the past four years over rooting out antisemitism and changing the Labour Party,” he said in May, “but it will never be ‘job done’. “We will be as ruthless in government as we have been in opposition, because we will never take our foot off the pedal on antisemitism.”
But current and former Jewish members of Labour who are pro-Palestinian told Middle East Eye they feel targeted, harassed and discriminated against in the party.
A letter sent to Labour’s General Secretary David Evans by Jewish Voice for Labour’s legal team in August 2023 asserted that Labour has been “discriminating unlawfully against its Jewish members”. Jewish Voice for Labour, a left-leaning and pro-Palestinian group within the party, was founded in 2017 when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. It alleged that non-Jewish members of the party have often harassed JVL members for being “the wrong type of Jew”. Jewish members of the party are six times more likely to be investigated over claims of antisemitism than non-Jewish members, the letter said, and 13 times more likely to be expelled.
Middle East Eye spoke to Andrew Feinstein, who was born in South Africa to Viennese Holocaust survivors. The prominent Jewish politician and writer campaigned against apartheid with Nelson Mandela and was elected in 1994 as an ANC member of parliament. Later, in Britain, he joined Labour in 2015 because he supported Corbyn. He is now standing for parliament against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras, having left Labour.
In late 2021, under Starmer’s leadership, Feinstein told MEE he received a notice of investigation from the party because of his social media posts. “They were saying to me that the nature of my views expressed on social media made it difficult for the party to campaign on issues of racism and antisemitism.” In one of the tweets cited as problematic, Feinstein had called Israel a “brutal, rogue, apartheid state just like my home, South Africa, was”. Feinstein said he sent the party a 35-page response to its draft charges in December 2021. “I asked them explicitly whether they wanted me to renounce the anti-racism I’d learnt from Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in order to adopt Starmer’s racist hierarchy of racism.” He said he didn’t hear back from the party, despite sending follow-up emails every few months. Feinstein said that when Jewish Voice for Labour wrote to the party in August 2023, Labour responded that it had decided not to investigate him.
“The accusations against me were made by a non-Jewish Labour member who trawled through my social media,” he told MEE. “The party takes these people more seriously than they take anti-racist Jews. Starmer has expelled more Jews than all the other Labour leaders combined.” MEE put this to the Labour Party but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Defending Corbyn
MEE also spoke to retired civil servant Jenny Manson, aged 75, who is currently co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour. Her mother was a refugee born near Kiev who fled anti-Jewish pogroms and came to Britain in 1919. Manson has been in the Labour Party nearly all her life. She joined as a teenager and then signed up to Oxford University’s Labour Club as a student to protest against Harold Wilson’s immigration legislation, which favoured white immigrants over others. She has since been a Labour councillor (1986-90) in the London borough of Barnet. She even stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate in 1987. “I was only on the soft left,” Manson said, “but I was pushed further left when Jeremy Corbyn stood for leader in 2015 and talked about getting rid of austerity. I was delighted when he won.”