Time for Labour's elder statesmen to stand up and be counted
Photo by Matthew Lewis/Getty Images
It was always really about Jeremy Corbyn’s often denied yet undeniable anti-Semitism. “He’s allowed the Labour Party to become institutionally anti-Semitic,” says Joan Ryan, the eighth MP to leave the party. “And he has a direct responsibility as the leader of this party.” Is the Labour leader an anti-Semite? “I find it hard to say he isn’t.”
There is one point on which I differ from Ms Ryan, who has chaired Labour Friends of Israel throughout the Corbyn years and has thus been on the receiving end of the “culture of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel” over which, she says, “he has presided”. She insists that this was “never a problem” before Corbyn took over in 2015.
In fact, Corbyn was elected leader by the mass membership because his predecessor, Ed Miliband, had allowed the party to be infiltrated by the far-Left. Already under Miliband, Labour’s first and almost certainly last Jewish leader, the anti-Semites were taking over under the guise of support for the Palestinians.
The then leader’s attitude of pre-emptive cringe was painful to behold. Miliband, whose parents had escaped the Holocaust, had himself photographed eating a bacon sandwich, as if to prove how little he cared about his Jewish heritage. This was days after he had accepted an invitation from the actress Maureen Lipman, a lifelong Labour voter, to a Shabbat dinner to learn more about what being Jewish meant. Then in 2014, at a time when it was locked in yet another deadly conflict with Hamas in Gaza, Miliband demanded that Israel recognise Palestine as a state. The far-Left was thrilled, but Ms Lipman wrote him an open letter in Standpoint: “Come election day, I shall give my vote to another party. Almost any other party. Until my party is again led by mensches.” That was the moment when many Jewish Labour supporters woke up to find their party had been hijacked.
The Yiddish word mensch is untranslatable, but it means something like “a decent person”. The absence of common decency at every level of the Labour Party is what has driven eight MPs (and counting) to leave it. This absence is apparent in the official policy of unconditional recognition for a Palestinian state on day one of a Labour government. Before doing anything for his country, in other words, Corbyn demands that his country do something for him: approve the replacement of the only Jewish state by another Arab one. He has imposed his own obsession with the Palestinian cause on his party and proposes to do the same to the British people.
Across the Channel, as I wrote here this week, anti-Semitism is a scourge that threatens to destroy everything Europe is supposed to stand for. Yesterday, however, President Macron and his two predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, led some 70 mass demonstrations against anti-Semitism in cities across France. None of these leaders is a Jew (Sarkozy has a Jewish grandfather) but they and thousands of Frenchmen and women are showing solidarity with their Jewish compatriots.
Why has that not happened here, where one of our two main parties is being torn apart because its leader is so feared by Jews that they are talking of emigration? Why was it left only to Jews themselves to march through Westminster to protest? That was almost a year ago. Nothing has happened since to challenge Corbyn’s position.
His anti-Semitic supporters show contempt for their critics. Only this week Ruth George MP alleged that the breakaway MPs might be secretly funded by Israel. Even though she later withdrew the comment and apologised, the conspiracy theorists will claim that she was forced to back down. She did not specifically apologise for the equally false claim that Labour Friends of Israel, the lobby group that has been chaired by Luciana Berger and Joan Ryan, is funded by the Israeli government. This is how the biggest lie of all, that Jews control the world, gains currency.
What might make a difference would be for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Lord Kinnock and other senior Labour politicians to join a mass demonstration against Corbyn and his crew. It would be a grand gesture if the other living ex-leader, Ed Miliband, were to join them, but he has unfortunately already demonstrated his solidarity, not with Luciana Berger, Joan Ryan and the Independent Group, but with his successor, Jeremy Corbyn. Even without him, the spectacle of Labour elder statesmen marching against the institutional anti-Semitism that has captured the party they love would make a real impact — if not on the party, at least on the public.
