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The British Labor Party’s Anti-Semitism Bonanza, and Jews Who Provide It with Cover

Returning from a week at Labor’s annual party conference, David Collier reports on the pervasiveness of the “Palestine solidarity” movement, which entails at best a sheer hatred of Israel and at worst undisguised anti-Semitism. Especially illustrative is Collier’s characterization of a booth run by the far-left Stop the War Coalition: “‘No to Islamophobia’ reads a sign behind the table; ‘Yes to Anti-Semitism,’ reads the leaflet on the table.” He continues:

In the Labor mainstream, “Palestine solidarity” is being confused with a movement of peace. This is a dangerously false appraisal that has allowed for [acceptance of] maximalist Arab political demands to become the basis for acceptance into the Labor fold.

Thugs . . . are acting as enforcers, where anybody who is not toeing this maximalist line is placed on a list in order to be threatened with expulsion [from the party]. At the conference, both the Jewish Labor Movement and Labor Friends of Israel were met with calls for expulsion. At the Labor Friends of Israel event, there were anti-Israel activists actually taking photos of the members of parliament who were present. . . .

The second event I went to was a launch event for a new “Jewish” group called Jewish Voice for Labor (JVL). . . . Having run through a list of those who say they attended, I would guess that perhaps only 10 to 15 percent were Jewish.

I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t get inside. I became a Jewish Labor member who was denied entry by Tony Greenstein [a leader of the British BDS movement] and Jacqueline Walker [a prominent figure in the Labor party who was briefly expelled last year for her anti-Semitic remarks]. I thus experienced the chilling situation of being turned away from a meeting of Jewish Labor members by someone who had claimed that Jews were chief financiers of the slave trade. . . .

The problem here is that the group JVL becomes a useful tool for racist bigotry, . . . because anti-Semites can hide behind them. They become legitimizers of the virulent [and] widespread anti-Semitism inherent in . . . Palestinianism. “If Jews compare Jews to Nazis, why can’t we?”

Read more at Beyond the Great Divide

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Labor Party (UK), Politics & Current Affairs, United Kingdom

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic