WhyLabourandIsrael havebothgotitwrong
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has something in common with the state of Israel: a blind spot called Palestine. For Labour it’s not seeing how support for the Palestinian cause carelessly trips over into anti-Semitic language. For Israel it’s blocking the twostate solution which would gain it world approval. Instead it illegally annexes Palestinian land for bloody great housing estates. Labour is a liberal-minded party. Israel is a liberal country, refreshingly open-minded about religion and sexuality. I feel at home in both. Yet Israel gets it wrong in big ways over Gaza, and in cruelly petty ones as I discovered visiting Rawabi, a West Bank new town designed to house 40,000 Palestinians. Israel stopped its completion by not widening a three-kilometre sliver of access road it controlled so construction trucks couldn’t get through. Instead of the thriving metropoIis planned, it was a ghost town. My frustration with Israel now extends to Labour’s leader, who should have closed down the anti- Semitism row engulfing him a long time ago.
Sharing platforms with antiSemites haunts him, as does staying silent as the National Executive’s thick-as-bricks Peter Willsman rants about Jews being Trump fanatics.
It looked like a breakthrough when Labour adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism. But it left four clauses out on Israel.
I also have a problem with the one which says it’s anti-Semitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel than their home country.
That prompted me to say in a TV debate: “I can see circumstances in which that would be a fact, and I can’t see why that would be antiSemitic.”
I got whacked on social media for “dancing on the edge of anti-Semitism”. Dual loyalty is a slur suffered by Jews down the ages, I was told.
But the fact is it can’t be racist to say a Jew put Israel first if they actually did. By spying on their country for Mossad, say.
Surely it would only be anti-Semitic, and defamatory too, to falsely accuse Jews of a higher loyalty to Israel. But that qualification isn’t in the text.
Yet if Labour is to follow a code, it can’t get away with only taking some.
That’s like drivers rejecting bits of the Highway Code they don’t like. Such as speed limits. Or in Labour’s case a road sign saying: No Left Turn.
Labour must swallow the whole shebang, come up with its own, or find an alternative. The UK College of Policing has one saying: “Criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.”
I can live with that. Jeremy Corbyn should, too.
He should have closed down antiSemitism row by now There are now 300 more staff down at the Intellectual Property Office than there were in 2010. Head count is up from 907 to 1,215. Yet patents are taking six months longer to grant. Which just shows the more intellectuals who deal with a problem, the longer it takes to solve.