It is utterly bewildering that Labour MPs and journalists thought it was fine to distinguish bad Jews from good this week, as a way to discredit Jeremy Corbyn’s Passover meeting with the radical London-based group Jewdas. These voices said the Jewish community organisation, friendly to the Labour leader, was the wrong kind of Jew. Yet other Jewish groups – those critical of the Labour leader – had until then refused to meet with him unconditionally. It wasn’t him refusing to meet them.
There is now a hole in the notion that only organisations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has shown support for Donald Trump and an increasingly rightist Israel, represent all British Jewry. As made clear by Jewdas’s activities, as well as their irreverent lampooning, it is a ludicrous idea that any one group could.
None of this lets some on the left off the hook over antisemitic behaviour, which can also sort Jewish people into good and bad, based mostly on how pro-Palestinian they are judged to be. So frequently are the terms “Jewish” and “Israel” collapsed (also, unhelpfully, by Israeli politicians) that many Jewish people feel uncomfortable, as though we must first and foremost prove that we aren’t mouthpieces for Benjamin Netanhayu’s government. You are swiftly dismissed as being motivated by your Jewishness if you stray from a narrow script on issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, indeed, antisemitism in the Labour party.
For Jewish supporters of the Labour leader, this row over antisemitism has felt like gaslighting on multiple fronts. Maddeningly, some Corbyn supporters tell us claims of antisemitism are exaggerated or a political weapon to take down the Labour leader.
Elsewhere on the political spectrum, we are cast as useful idiots, as though we have not been pointing out the antisemitism polluting the left for some time – actually, before Corbyn even became leader. The chutzpah cherry on top of this damningly simplistic debate is the contribution from populist campaigns using leftist antisemitism to drive a poisonous wedge between Jews and Muslims.
All sides are lobbing political grenades, which are exploding in the faces of progressive British Jews who are then having to deal with varying degrees of hostility and manipulation. In this tit-for-tat, of course, the issue of antisemitism is being totally sidelined.
We are all products of the same society, so it would be fantasy to assume that the left is magically immune to the pernicious hatred that breeds antisemitism. While this is depressing, it should not be surprising – or excused – that some people holding leftwing views are defending an antisemitic mural, or replicating antisemitic tropes about “very powerful special-interest groups” involved in a Jewish-led protest.
Earlier this year, a rightwing broadsheet newspaper failed to spot the implications of its story on the investor George Soros, which would have been cheered by far-right groups as reinforcing antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers. Irrespective of whom they vote for, some struggled to see the problem there.
At the same time, it is unproductive to try to deflect the problem of antisemitism on the left by claiming that the right is worse. Fighting this kind of racial hatred, and tackling prejudice with education and awareness, is precisely the point of the left. This simply has not been promoted actively enough in recent years, unless you are prepared to believe that people have wandered into leftist movements and somehow missed this central piece of information. While we’re on the subject, this is as true of the need to counter toxic anti-immigration sentiments in the UK as it is of antisemitism.
If this has been a wake-up call for the left – and the response from Momentum is encouraging – it could hardly have come at a better time. With a resurgent far right across Europe and in the US, we are witnessing a level and type of antisemitism that many thought would never again so blatantly resurface. With its mixture of community-strengthening social change and economics of wealth-redistribution, this Labour leadership is best equipped to counter the nativist right. But the contamination of some legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the inability to resoundingly extract one from the other, has weakened the left on what should be one of its key fronts.
The problems exposed in the current debate should galvanise leftist movements into a necessary reckoning over antisemitism. Now, more than ever, we need to square up to our opponents in this urgent fight.