Daily Times

The charge of anti-Semitism has roiled the British Labour Party, once one of Israel’s staunchest supporters. Party members tended to think anti-Semitism was a disease of the right. Now, it’s become the reverse.

Both prominent figures and ordinary members have been suspended from membership and from posts on suspicion of this form of racism, as the leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seeks to stamp out a theme that has had the governing Conservatives crowing with schadenfreude. Jewish supporters are deserting the party and members are forced to protest their aversion to one of the world’s oldest prejudices.

The issue came to light after Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, stirred up a storm last month by suggesting that Hitler was a Zionist (for considering a plan to ship German Jews to Palestine). Days earlier, recently-elected British parliamentarian Naz Shah had resigned as an aide to Labour’s shadow chancellor because of remarks she made on Facebook in 2014.

Shah had shared a poster stating that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was to relocate Israel to the United States. The poster proclaimed that the “transportation costs” would be ”less than three years of defense spending” – a sentiment Shah seemed to endorse in her accompanying remarks.

As the arguments gathered force, at least 50 Labour Party members were secretly suspended for saying, as Corbyn put it, “What they should not have done.”

The British chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said the problem was “severe.” The Israeli Labour leader Isaac Herzog said the affair was “sickening.” Labour, which had been the “natural” party of choice of many British Jews for decades, was increasingly viewed as toxic.

It’s worth being clear about how anti-Semitism is understood these days. Only a few very hard right groups still openly proclaim their belief that Jews are degenerate, a source of evil and of worldwide conspiracy.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Front National, has sought to cleanse her party of the shadow of anti-Semitism, even though it was a favored trope of her predecessor and father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In Italy, Gianfranco Fini, former leader of the former postwar fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, which he transformed into the Alleanza Nazionale and was part of several coalitions of the center-right, went so far as to say that burning the Israeli flag was “worse than murder.” He made a highly publicized and respectful visit to Israel.

Overt, violent, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism has become rare. But for some, it still exists in more subtle forms.

One example cited by supporters of the Jewish state: Israelis, diaspora Jews and other supporters of Israel look to the BDS (Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions) movement, which promotes precisely what it says on the label. The BDS movement argues that Israel is defying U.N. decisions, oppressing Palestinians, occupying their land and seeking continual expansion — and that this must be stopped.

The movement has a point, which is usually conceded by liberal Israelis. The settlements on the West Bank do occupy Palestinian land; the current government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has moved more sharply to the right with the inclusion of Avigdor Lieberman and his small ultra-nationalist party in the coalition. The government is now even less likely to restrain the expansion of settlements. (Lieberman lives in one.)

But almost no Israelis, including those on the left, support BDS. When recently in Israel, I asked the prominent liberal scholar Asher Susser about the issue. He replied: “When you say, why pick on Israel when there are so many worse offenders against others’ rights? They might say, well, you have to start somewhere. And I reply – so who’s next after Israel? And they have no answer.”

Many Israelis believe that BDS supporters reflect a form of concealed anti-Semitism. They argue that Israel is being picked out from all other human-rights offenders because it is the state of the Jews.

Then there is anti-Semitism through association – a charge which comes right up to the door of Corbyn himself. Sometime in the 1960s and 197070s, part of the left in the West moved away from support for Israel toward seeing it as an oppressor and a forward base of Western imperialism – the position hinted at by the parliamentarian Naz Shah.

Corbyn and his closest associate John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, spent most of their political life before their unexpected elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party on the far left – where condemnation of Israel, support for BDS and support for the Palestinians were articles of faith. In comments that have come back to haunt him, Corbyn referred to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza as “friends” – though both groups are dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Corbyn and McDonnell would reject any charge of anti-Semitism, and would mean it. They might even say that some of their best friends are Jewish.

But the close association with groups who wish to wipe out the Jewish state undercuts the protest. The more, since there is no record of their dissociating themselves from these groups’ positions.

The Labour Party is not, as a group of political activists, anti-Semitic: its former leader, Edward Miliband, was Jewish, wholly without controversy. The current dispute, however, will continue to damage Israel even after it passes.

For Israelis, and for British and European Jews, the fact that leading members of a party assumed to be well disposed to Israel should be represented as bigoted, and that the leadership of the Labour Party should have been so enthusiastically on the side of Israel’s most bitter enemies, will not be easily erased.

In many conversations with Israeli liberals last week in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I was told that the addition of Lieberman to the government brought shame on the country.

For those on the left who see Zionism – the underpinning of the Israeli state – as simple imperialism and occupation, Israeli liberals are merely softer-toned occupiers. British Labour’s flirtation with the dark side of prejudice is likely to lead to a further leftist withdrawal from a world seen as irremediably hostile – and a strengthening of the forces that the liberals most detest.

John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is senior research fellow. Lloyd has written several books, including “What the Media Do to Our Politics.” He is also a contributing editor to FT and the founder of FT Magazine