[rad-green] As a British Jew I’m not fearful of a Corbyn government but I’m horrified at how antisemit ism is being used against him

*https://www.patheos.com/blogs/writingfromtheedge/2019/11/as-a-british-jew-im-not-fearful-of-a-corbyn-government-but-im-horrified-at-how-antisemitism-is-being-used-against-him/
<https://www.patheos.com/blogs/writingfromtheedge/2019/11/as-a-british-jew-im-not-fearful-of-a-corbyn-government-but-im-horrified-at-how-antisemitism-is-being-used-against-him/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=share_bar#bSThWZcFTfG0eo4y.03>*

*PATHEOS          NOVEMBER 13, 2019*
As a British Jew I’m not fearful of a Corbyn government but I’m horrified
at how antisemitism is being used against him*BY ROBERT A. H. COHEN*

I’ve been told to fear the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/corbyn-as-pm-prompts-fear-not-known-before-says-top-uk-jewish-journalist/>.
I’ve been warned that the Labour Party leader is antisemitic
<https://www.thejc.com/comment/leaders/we-face-a-dire-prospect-at-this-election-jc-leader-1.490909>.
And, according to a new poll, nearly half of British Jews are considering
leaving the country
<https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-nearly-half-of-british-jews-say-they-would-seriously-consider-fleeing-the-country-if-corbyn-is-elected-pm/>
if
Labour wins the General Election on December 12th.

Despite the doomsday picture being painted for British Jews, I’m not
fearful of Corbyn or the possibility of him reaching 10 Downing Street. Nor
do I believe that the Labour Party is “poisoned” or “rampant” with
antisemitism. But what has left me horrified over the last four years has
been the reckless and irresponsible way in which antisemitism has been used
to vilify Corbyn and make the entire Labour Party appear toxic.

For the record, I’m not a Labour Party activist, or even a Labour Party
member. I have no particular brief to support Jeremy Corbyn. In local and
national elections over the years, I’ve voted for Liberal Democrat
candidates, Labour candidates and Green candidates. Geography means I don’t
attend a synagogue as often as I’d like to, but I read and love my Jewish
prayer book, and at home we light Shabbat candles and we celebrate the
Jewish festivals. I worry about rising antisemitism around the world and I
care about the safety and security of Jews in Britain. And because of all
these things, it bothers me deeply when I see antisemitism become drained
of meaning
<https://www.patheos.com/blogs/writingfromtheedge/2018/07/the-jewish-establishments-war-against-corbyn-risks-bringing-real-antisemitism-to-britain/>
for
the sake of narrow political advantage.

The UK’s Brexit induced General Election was always going to be about more
than just Brexit. And so it should be. A decade of chronic underinvestment
in public services; the growing disparity between rich and poor; our
response to the Climate Emergency; and the very future of the United
Kingdom itself, all need to be central themes of the campaign over the next
month. The one issue that does not need to be part of the debate is
antisemitism. At least not the version of the antisemitism debate we’ve
been having over the last few years which has become profoundly politicised.
*The opening days of the campaign*

As things stand, scaremongering about antisemitism is in danger of
hijacking the 2019 election. This is not good for British Jews nor for
British democracy.

The position of the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish News, the two most
widely read Jewish newspapers in the UK, is entirely expected and
consistent with the campaign they have been running since September 2015
when Corbyn was elected Labour Party leader.

As this General Election campaign got underway, the Jewish Chronicle’s
editorial
<https://www.thejc.com/comment/leaders/we-face-a-dire-prospect-at-this-election-jc-leader-1.490909>
 stated:

“The impact of a Labour victory is almost unimaginable for our
community…The prospect is truly frightening.”

The Jewish News titled its main Op Ed ‘The nightmare before Chanukah?’
<https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-nightmare-before-chanukah/>

What exactly are these editorial writers expecting to happen if Corbyn
becomes Prime Minister? Shouldn’t it be possible to imagine it? Is there
some hidden anti-Jewish manifesto in Corbyn’s back pocket that only they
have seen? Their language suggests they expect immediate discriminatory
laws against Jews to be enacted by a Corbyn government or, at the very
least, a hostile environment against Jews to be created across the country.

Speaking at a formal dinner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on
November 4 the Board’s President, Marie van de Zyl, also hinted at the dark
consequences of a Corbyn victory by saying the Board was “preparing for all
scenarios.”

What kind of “scenarios” is the Board preparing for? It’s never made clear
because it makes no sense. But a feeling of impending doom is created and
left hanging in the air.

The Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, who’s been a prominent left of
centre critic of Corbyn since his election, wove the same mood of dread and
anxiety in a recent article
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/09/jews-brexit-boris-johnson-jeremy-corbyn?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>
in
which he repeated the now well-worn (and well-refuted)
<https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/rebuttals/> allegations
against Corbyn:

“I understand that to many, all this will sound overwrought. I’m afraid
that Jewish history has made us that way, prone to imagining the worst. We
look at our usually sparse family trees and we can pick out the pessimists,
those who panicked and got out. It was they who left their mark on us. You
see, the optimists, those who assumed things would work out for the best,
they never made it out in time.”

It sounds “overwrought” because it is overwrought. But worse still, it’s
feeding a moral panic across the nation and stoking fear in Jewish homes
without a credible threat being presented.

But the Jewish establishment’s campaign against Jeremy Corbyn has never
been only about convincing British Jews not to vote Labour.

The number of Jewish voters in the UK is tiny. Including adults and
children, we make up only 0.5% of the population. There are only a handful
of constituencies, mostly in North London, where Jewish votes (assuming
they are cast uniformly) could make a decisive difference to the outcome.
In any case, the majority of Jews stopped voting Labour long before Corbyn
became leader. That’s to do with the economic and social advancement that
most Jews in Britain have achieved. Until recently, it’s had nothing to do
with Corbyn or antisemitism.

So branding Corbyn as antisemitic has always been about influencing the
wider UK electorate. And it may well have succeeded. A poll carried out in
April 2019
<https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/103321/blow-jeremy-corbyn-poll-shows-sharp-rise-voters>
reported
that 55% of respondents agreed with the statement that Mr Corbyn’s “failure
to tackle anti-semitism within his own party shows he is unfit to be prime
minister”.

Conservative supporting national newspapers, in particular the Daily Mail,
The Times, The Telegraph, The Express, have all been enthusiastic
amplifiers of the ‘Corbyn is antisemitic’ narrative. Neither these national
newspapers nor the more liberal Guardian or the BBC, have shown much
interest in seriously interrogating, let along challenging the allegations.
The case against our mainstream media in its handling of the Labour
antisemitism saga has been well established by media analysts and
antisemitism experts in the book ‘Bad News for Labour’
<https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/bad-news-for-labour-an-essential-handbook/>
published
last month.

Meanwhile, the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats’ leader, Jo Swinson, speaking
at her party’s election campaign launch
<https://antisemitism.uk/jo-swinson-lambasts-jeremy-corbyn-on-antisemitism-in-lib-dem-campaign-launch-and-rules-out-backing-him-as-pm/>
on
November 5 came up with the most peculiar, contorted and self-serving
framing of the antisemitism accusation I’ve seen so far:

“Most importantly, the reason why people are Remain [on the Brexit
question] is about values, and one of those values is so important – is the
value of equality – for recognising that people can be themselves, as
individuals, whatever the colour of their skin, whatever God they pray to,
whoever they are. And Jeremy Corbyn’s complete and utter failure to root
out antisemitism in his own Party, is a – just – total dereliction of duty
when it comes to protecting that value of equality.”

While this alignment of racism, inequality and support for Brexit may have
some coherence when you look to the political right, it’s hard to make
sense of it in Corbyn’s case, not when you examine Corbyn’s track record on
campaigning against racism or his party’s policies on immigration and
refugees. And while Corbyn’s position on Brexit is deliberately ambiguous,
painting him as a hard Brexiteer doesn’t tally with his party’s position
over the last three years. But hey, let’s not let any pesky facts spoil the
antisemitism story.

As for the Conservative Party leader and current Prime Minister, Boris
Johnson, he’s happily climbed on the bandwagon by describing his main
opponents in this election as: “fratricidal antisemitic Marxists”. I feel
sure he will return with characteristic enthusiasm to the subject as the
election campaign reaches its climax.

For a more detailed account of how the right is exploiting and abusing
antisemitism during this election, and over the last few years, I’d
recommend the article by antisemitism academic Tony Lerman
<https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/when-jews-are-just-fodder-tory-propaganda-machine/>
in
Open Democracy.
*The case against Corbyn’s Labour*

So what is the case against Corbyn? And does it stack up as the
show-stopping, moral argument against his gaining elected high office?

It’s always been difficult to disentangle the allegations of antisemitism
from the wider divisions within Labour over Corbyn’s shift of the party to
the left. The growing influence of more left-wing Labour members at the
grass roots and within its national decision making bodies has been fought
against by Labour MPs who favoured the Blair/Brown years of Labour
leadership. Antisemitism has, in part, become a proxy battle in a bigger
ideological war over how Labour should respond to decades of neo-liberalism
and more recently austerity. So motivations can be, and have been, mixed
and complex.
But there’s another at factor at play that’s always been at the heart of
the story about Labour and antisemitism.

It’s impossible to understand the personal criticism against Corbyn without
recognising that it’s nearly always in the context of a wider debate over
the behaviour of Israel towards the Palestinian people.

Corbyn has been a long standing campaigner for Palestinian rights for
decades. Those official and establishment Jewish voices that say they fear
a Corbyn government tell us they do so because they fear a radical change
in the safety and security of Jews in Britain. But a more credible
explanation for their accusations is the possibility of a radical change in
the attitude of the British government towards the State of Israel. But in
merely expressing the possibility of a political motive behind the attacks,
one quickly becomes branded as anti-Jewish. Freedom of speech gets buried
alive in this war over the meaning of antisemitism.

Having noted this central aspect of the saga, it’s also true that some on
the left make themselves, and by association Corbyn, easy targets for
justified criticism. The left’s emphasis on the wrongs of empire,
colonialism and racism lead to a small minority expressing an obsessive and
un-nuanced understanding of Zionist thinking which too easily trips into
antisemitism.

It’s true too that Israel/Palestine has become a totemic cause on the left,
much as South African apartheid was in the 70s and 80s or the Vietnam War
in the 60s. But there are perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to
highlight Israel as a nation with a long and on-going history of human
rights abuses which western leaders choose not to act against. A few on the
left will make the lazy mistake of falling into anti-Jewish rhetoric to
explain why this has happened. This in turn enables the professional
advocates for Israel to label all anti-Israel criticism on the left as
founded on nothing more than antisemitism.

The questions we are then left with are: how great is the scale of the
problem and how well has Corbyn dealt with it?
Let the numbers speak

The precise scale of reported antisemitism within the Labour Party became
clear at the start of this year when Labour’s general secretary, Jennie
Formby, released detailed numbers covering accusations of antisemitism
<https://labourlist.org/2019/02/jennie-formby-provides-numbers-on-labour-antisemitism-cases/>
made
against Labour members between April 2018 and January 2019. This covered
the period during which media interest in the story reached fever pitch in
the summer and autumn of 2018.

The 673 accusations as a percentage of party members amounted to 0.1% of
the total Party membership. However, 220 of the allegations were rejected
through the disciplinary process which left 453 (or 0.08% of party
membership) accused, found guilty and disciplined. Of these, only 12 were
considered serious enough to warrant permanent expulsion.

Further analysis of these figures
<https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/antisemitism-no-justification-for-singling-out-labour/>,
and other data, and their comparison to survey data of antisemitism in the
UK population as a whole, has been carried out by statistician Alan
Maddison. The upshot is, there’s less antisemitism in Labour than you would
expect to find in the UK population as a whole (which is already among the
lowest in the world). In fact, reputable surveying in 2017 by Jewish Policy
Research
<https://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/JPR.2017.Antisemitism_in_contemporary_Great_Britain.pdf>,
showed that antisemitism was more prevalent on the right and far right than
on the left in the UK.

“Levels of antisemitism among those on the left-wing of the political
spectrum, including the far-left, are indistinguishable from those found in
the general population.”

Which again begs the question as to why all the focus has been on Labour
since Corbyn became leader. The numbers suggest we should be looking
elsewhere.
*What about Corbyn himself?*

If Jeremy Corbyn is truly antisemitic he must be the most unusual and
eccentric example of antisemitism ever displayed by a British political
leader and perhaps any political leader.

When you are told that a politician is a diehard antisemite you don’t
expect to then discover that over the decades he’s signed dozens of Early
Day Parliamentary motions condemning antisemitism
<https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/fifty-times-jeremy-corbyn-stood-with-jewish-people/>;
helped organised protests against anti-Jewish marches; visited the Terezin
concentration camp to commemorate Holocaust victims; attended numerous
Jewish events in his constituency; and read the war poetry of Isaac
Rosenberg at his local Remembrance Day service
<https://www.facebook.com/JeremyCorbynMP/posts/today-i-will-be-attending-the-remembrance-day-service-at-londons-cenotaph-with-m/10154758441483872/>
.

The list of antisemitic ‘crimes’ by Corbyn which have been ‘unearthed’ to
‘expose’ his guilt all crumble for anyone who bothers to do some fact
checking or examine the context
<https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/statement/rebuttals/> in which
they happened.

If I have criticisms of Corbyn over his handling of antisemitism it’s that
he did not defend himself or his party more robustly.

He should have toured the TV studios during the spring and summer of 2018
to refute the allegations made against him. He should have invited his
accusers, in particular Campaign Against Antisemitism, and the leaders of
the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and the editor of the
Jewish Chronicle, to debate face to face. He should have given a platform
to Palestinian voices to demonstrate the problematic nature of the IHRA
“illustrations” of antisemitism
<https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism>. He
should have given a major speech setting out his understanding of Jewish
history, of antisemitism, of what does and does not count as fair criticism
of Israel and Zionism.

The strategy of not giving more oxygen to the allegations through direct
engagement turned out to be wrong. It just encouraged more vilification.
*The failure of Jewish leadership*

But the greatest failings in this story have not been Corbyn’s.

Over the last four years the formal leadership of the Jewish community in
the UK, aided and abetted by Jewish community newspapers and the Campaign
Against Antisemitism, have succeed in making the task of fighting
anti-Jewish behaviour harder and more complicated.

They have exaggerated a problem within Labour and enabled a false narrative
to take hold in the public’s understanding of the issue. In doing this,
they have made antisemitism into a party political football.

With their promotion of the IHRA document as the international ‘gold
standard’ of wording rather than the “working document” its authors
describe it as, they have imposed on politicians, local authorities,
universities and Churches a weak and deeply flawed definition of
antisemitism.

They have promoted illustrations of antisemitism which are already chilling
free speech and denying another people their history and identity.
<https://www.patheos.com/blogs/writingfromtheedge/2018/09/if-you-want-a-fair-definition-of-zionism-its-best-to-ask-a-palestinian/>

By turning antisemitism into a political battleground, they have created
‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’ – those that are allowed to speak with a Jewish
voice and those that are condemned as traitors.

The campaign against Labour has never been about reforming or educating a
small minority or rooting out a tiny hardcore of antisemitism. This has
been about regime change. Only Corbyn’s resignation as leader was ever
going to be truly acceptable.

With a General Election campaign now in full swing, Labour candidates and
Labour activists, and indeed Labour voters, are being told they are
actively promoting antisemitism or at least ignoring the concerns of the
Jewish community in Britain. It’s no longer just Corbyn that’s being
vilified. It’s half the country.

Meanwhile, Jewish families have become fearful under entirely false
pretenses.

This is not good Jewish leadership. This is a dangerous failure of
leadership.

If Labour loses this election and antisemitism allegations are perceived to
have been a key factor in the Party’s defeat, what will be the long term
political consequences? How will millions of voters perceive our Jewish
institutions and leaders and indeed Jews in general?
A better debate on antisemitism

Whatever the result of this General Election, we’re going to need a better
and very different debate about antisemitism in Britain than the one we’ve
been having.

Antisemitism is real and it’s growing. We need to face into the role Israel
plays in generating antisemitism. We need to recognise that Zionism can be
experienced as both a movement for Jewish liberation and as a project of
racist, settler colonialism. We need to be clear from which political
direction the most serious dangers to Jews and other minorities are coming
from. For some on the left, there is a need to learn some Jewish history
and appreciate why so many Jews feel such an emotional tie towards Israel.

As for those who currently claim to speak in the interests of Jews in
Britain, they too could do with some serious historical and political
education. Or perhaps just early retirement.

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