Institutional Jew-hate on left won’t go away

KEN LIVINGSTONE wanted to be remembered as London’s natural mayor, whom Margaret Thatcher couldn’t abolish and Tony Blair couldn’t deselect. In the end, he will be remembered as the man who couldn’t stop talking about Hitler.

In the 1980s, Livingstone pioneered rainbow politics, which aimed to bring oppressed minorities together to make them more powerful than their oppressors.

But Jews were not welcome. Jews, at least those who were unwilling to disavow Israel, were characterised as similar to their own oppressors and as collaborators with their own murderers.

Instead they were designated as “Zionists” — racists, imperialists and Nazis — and they were excluded. This was presented as a benign impulse to side with the Palestinians. Anyone who didn’t like it was accused of siding against the Palestinians.

Livingstone accused Jews of opposing antisemitism only as a dishonest trick to try to silence criticism of Israel.

He portrayed those who raise the issue of antisemitism on the left as not simply wrong or oversensitive but part of a Jewish conspiracy to lie for Israel.

I coined the phrase “The Livingstone Formulation” to describe this refusal to engage with allegations of antisemitism by making counterclaims about those making the allegations.

But Livingstone is being made into a scapegoat. Those running today’s Labour Party hope the stink of antisemitism can be laid upon Red Ken as he goes into the wilderness and that he can take it with him.

But it isn’t antisemitism they want to drive out, it is what they see as the persistent and dishonest allegation of it, made by Zionists, Blairites and Tories.

Labour still hasn’t got the message.

The Corbynites insist that antisemitism is a matter of bad people who need to be found and expelled.

But the problem is still politics, not process. There is an institutional antisemitism on the British left which cannot be reduced to individuals who happen to hate Jews.

And it cannot be purged with the exit of its most explicit, articulate and popular spokesperson.

The problem is still politics, not process’

David Hirsh is Senior Lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism