Fighting antisemitism

There are lots of positives in Jeremy Corbyn’s article “I will root antisemites out of Labour – they do not speak for me”, which has just been published in the Guardian (3 August). Corbyn condemns attempts to belittle concerns expressed by the Jewish community. He acknowledges that Labour has “a real problem” in that trust between the Party and the Jewish community is at a “low ebb”. He pledges that Labour will take steps to resolve that problem. A Labour government will defend all aspects of Jewish life. Antisemitism will be driven out of the Labour Party for good. Education and training will...

There is something dreamlike in the turmoil in and around the Labour Party about anti-semitism. Episodes occur — Pete Wilsman on the seventy rabbis are pulled out of the memory hole; the meeting Jeremy Corbyn hosted back in 2010... There are demands for confession, retraction and contrition. Corbyn goes through the motions of responding to the latest revelations, disinterred memory of old events. For sure, his opponents in the party and the Tory press are out to get him. One of two things then: either they’re telling the truth on this matter or they aren’t. Either there is a problem of anti...

The Labour Party is right to engage with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) guidelines as a living document (something to be engaged with, discussed, analysed, interpreted and expanded upon), and indeed this is what it would appear was intended by the writers of the IHRA guidance. It does not read as something intended to be a code of conduct, but rather as the basis for raising awareness and deepening understanding of modern antisemitism. Even the short 40-word definition (which is really the working definition according to the IHRA) is described within the guidance as...

We publish extracts from an article by two leading members of the Communist Party of Britain, Mary Davis and Phil Katz, which appeared in the Morning Star of 20 June. It makes a refreshing change from the absolute anti-Zionism and denial of antisemitism as a serious problem on the left that generally characterises that paper’s coverage of the subject. It is also good to see the paper carrying such sharp criticism of an earlier article published in the Star that clearly crossed the line into outright antisemitism. However, the fact that the offending article (now removed from the Star’s website...

It is surprising that the Eurovision Song Contest, a festival of high-camp commercialism, should have become a focus of political interest. For some of the participating countries the contest has pushed the boundaries of gender politics. The contest was won in 1998 by the transgender Israeli singer Dana International and in 2014 by the genderqueer Austrian Conchita Wurst, perhaps best described as a drag queen with a beard. Much other controversy around the competition has focused on Russia which has twice invaded other countries in the competition. After Russia’s annexation a region in...

Labour’s 13 point action plan to deal with antisemitism has been leaked to the Huffington Post. While it is welcome that the party wants a clear plan to tackle antisemitism, its apparent conclusions should be of concern to those of us who want to deal with antisemitism as a political problem. The plan includes a speeded up process for complaints, a smaller number of trained people to investigate, greater transparency over what is and will not be considered evidence. All of this is useful, but just a clearer disciplinary process will not deal with what is a political problem. We need much more...

Consider Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party, Al Capone and the US government. They jailed Alphonse Capone, a multiple-murderer gangster, for tax evasion. That was odd, but I think it better they got him for that than that they didn’t get him at all. So with Ken Livingstone’s separation from the Labour Party on antisemitism. Livingstone has for nearly four decades been a public purveyor of political antisemitism. Here I want to consider how serious antisemitism has spread into the Labour Party by way of the ostensibly revolutionary left — the WRP and the SWP — and their ex-members migrating...

In a speech to a meeting of the Palestinian National Council held in Ramallah last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed: • Ashkenazi Jews were not descended from the original Israelites and therefore had “no historical ties” to Israel. • Israel was conceived as a European project: European politicians restricted Jewish immigration into their own countries but encouraged Jewish immigration to Israel. Israel was “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness.” • The Holocaust and earlier waves of persecution of Jews were not an expression of antisemitism but...

On 25 April thousands of atheists, Christians, and Muslims joined Jews on the streets of Berlin, Erfurt, Potsdam, Cologne and other German cities in “kippa day”. They demonstratively wore the skullcap (kippa) used by Orthodox Jewish men, in a protest against antisemitism. This was sparked by an incident on 18 April, when a young man was attacked on a posh Berlin street for wearing a kippa. He was an Israeli Arab who had put on the kippa to show a friend (so he thought) that antisemitism was slight and there would be no problem. The chief of Germany’s Jewish community followed up by advising...

This graphic, compiled from UN figures, is taken from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The deaths have been fewer in recent weeks — one, four, four on Fridays 13, 20, 27 April, as against 44 total for the first five Fridays. That must be partly due to the protests against the killings organised within Israel, and also by left-wing Jewish groups in the USA. At the Workers’ Liberty forum in London on 26 April about Israel-Palestine, the left, and antisemitism, two additional sets of figures were cited. A pro-Israeli-government speaker from the floor told us that the Israeli government has reported...