Labour says it poses no threat to British Jews
LONDON • Three Jewish newspapers in Britain charged on Thursday that a government led by the country’s opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, would be an “existential threat” to their community — a coordinated attack that deepened a long-running crisis over accusations of anti-Semitism within his Labour Party.
In a move they described as unprecedented, The Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish News and The Jewish Telegraph all published the same scathing commentary on their front pages, under the headline “United We Stand.” It protests Labour’s decision to drop a passage about Israel from an internationally accepted definition of antiSemitism that the party incorporated in its official code of conduct.
The Labour Party rejected the claims and said in a statement that it posed “no threat of any kind whatsoever to Jewish people,” and was “committed to tackling and eradicating anti-Semitism in all its forms.”
Yet for months Corbyn has been unable to close down a damaging dispute over allegations that, under his leadership, the party has failed to tackle anti-Semitism within its ranks. That has alienated lawmakers, faith leaders and parts of a Jewish community in Britain that once saw Labour as a natural political home.
In March, demonstrators gathered outside Parliament in a protest intended to show that Jews no longer felt welcome in the party. That followed the revelation that in 2012, Corbyn had endorsed a mural that was widely considered anti-Semitic — something for which he has since apologized.
The latest rift concerns the failure of the party’s national executive committee, its governing body, to accept the full text of the working definition of anti-Semitism compiled by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. While Labour has adopted the document’s definition, it has not accepted all of the 11 illustrative examples accompanying it.
In particular it rejects one that defines “claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour” as anti-Semitic. Labour’s objection is that the definition could be used to restrict unfairly how Palestinians or their supporters may describe their plight.
Corbyn, who comes from the activist left wing of the Labour Party, has long been a supporter of Palestinian causes and a critic of many Israeli government policies, though he insists that he opposes all forms of bigotry, including anti-Semitism.
Labour lawmakers are to vote in September on whether to adopt the remembrance alliance definition’s full wording, following discussions at a meeting earlier this week.
In their joint article, the three newspapers argued that they were taking the collective stance “because of the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government.”