Angela Merkel admits that German Jews must be protected. But what about Britain, Mr Corbyn?
Where anti-Semitism is concerned, Europe’s cultural amnesia has plumbed new depths. In Germany, Jews are warned not to wear the kippa in public. Chancellor Merkel admits that every Jewish school and synagogue must be protected by police. In Britain, meanwhile, the Labour Party is under investigation for institutional anti-Semitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). And the chief suspect is the Leader of the Opposition.
How did it come to this? Wasn’t the whole post-war settlement built on the idea that the Holocaust, as it later came to be known, must never happen again? So how have the peoples of Europe forgotten that most solemn obligation while the last survivors are still very much with us?
Last week Judith Kerr, author of much-loved children’s classics, died aged 95. She and her family had fled Germany after her father’s books were among those burnt by the Nazis. Alfred Kerr had been Berlin’s leading theatre critic, in the era of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Judith Kerr’s story The Tiger who came to Tea was not, she insisted, a parable about the Gestapo coming to her parents’ apartment. But her autobiography, When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit, most certainly was intended to remind younger generations of what it was like to flee into exile as a young girl. In Germany, that book has long been on the school curriculum.
And yet the attacks on the tiny German Jewish community not only continue, but are getting worse: some 1,800 anti-Semitic crimes were recorded there last year, an increase of a fifth. If Europe’s most historically conscious society, the land where the culture of remembrance has been most assiduously promoted at every level, has still succumbed to antisemitism to the extent that Jews live in fear of attack, then something has gone terribly wrong.
In her important new book, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, the historian Mary Fulbrook notes the passing of survivors, eyewitnesses and perpetrators. She argues that justice can now be done, even if only posthumously, by identifying a much wider range of the guilty than was possible in their lifetimes. Such identification may help us to guard against a recurrence of anti-Semitism, which has mutated into new forms during the last three quarters of a century. But naming and shaming those who propagate this evil is never straightforward, especially when they wield considerable power and influence.
Here in Britain, we are faced with just such a problem. Jeremy Corbyn has just turned 70 and he has devoted much of his long career in politics indulging a hate-filled obsession with the state of Israel. He has never hesitated to make common cause with mortal enemies of the Jewish state, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups.
But Corbyn has also consistently turned a blind eye to, and occasionally lapsed into, older forms of anti-Semitism. One of the most notorious incidents was when he sneered at Jewish protestors, calling them “Zionists” who “don’t understand English irony”. Another was when he wrote a foreword to Imperialism, a “brilliant” work by J.A. Hobson, which omitted to mention the author’s blatantly anti-Semitic theory that Europe was controlled by the Rothschilds and other Jews. He is equally consistent in his refusal to apologise.
Knowing all this about him, the Labour Party nonetheless elected Corbyn as its leader. Predictably, a culture of anti-Semitism has flourished in the party over the past four years. Now the EHRC has launched an unprecedented and forensic investigation which will have the power to examine private emails and other evidence. The commission will need to be fearless in demanding to see what the party leader and his entourage have been telling one another. For years, Corbyn has dragged his feet about expelling anti-Semites from the Labour Party. He has kept tight control of the complaints procedure. Yet the Corbyn machine did not hesitate to have Alastair Campbell kicked out, only days after the latter admitted that he — in common with more than one in five Labour voters of 2017 — had voted for the Liberal Democrats.
Britain has a unique place in recent European history: not only for playing a decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany, but also for resisting the tide of anti-Semitism that swept the Continent in the last century. The world has looked on in dismay as the Leader of the Opposition disgraces the Labour Party by associating it with anti-Semitism. Now the EHRC has begun a process that may well end with Jeremy Corbyn’s own disgrace.
