Jews in Britain at a loss on how to vote

Lifelong Labour supporters feel disenfranchised

LONDON • Britain’s Jewish community is on edge before a pivotal vote. Thursday’s general election is a bitter contest over two radically different visions of the country, but many say Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has normalized anti-semitism in public debate to an unprecedented degree.

For months, the campaign has featured a standoff between Corbyn and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, of the Conservative party, over Brexit and the aftermath of austerity politics. But constant allegations of anti-semitism have dogged the Labour party, which has found support in the past from many in the tiny Jewish community, which accounts for no more than 0.5 per cent of the total population but finds itself in the centre of the public eye.

Forty-seven per cent of British Jews say they will consider leaving the country if Corbyn is elected prime minister, according to a poll conducted by the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s most influential Jewish newspaper.

According to a separate poll, 86 per cent of British Jews view Corbyn to be anti-semitic.

The Labour leader has a tendency to use clear anti-semitic tropes in his frequent criticisms of Israel and remarks about Jews. In 2011, Corbyn appeared on Iranian state-funded television and said that the BBC had “bias” for saying “that Israel has a right to exist.”

In 2012, he shared an image of a London mural on his Facebook page that depicted a group of bankers, some of whom were drawn with clear anti-semitic caricatures, playing a game of world domination.

In 2013, he said that certain “Zionists” in Britain “don’t understand English irony,” a remark many interpreted as an old-fashioned sneer about how Jews can never quite belong.

“At the end of the day, you’re still a bloody Jew. It’s a good reminder that you are still a stranger in whichever country you are,” said Joseph Deutsch, 75, who retired from a printing company, is an Orthodox Jew and a lifelong resident of Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighbourhood in leafy north London.

“I’m speaking as someone in his 70s. I don’t think anyone in their 20s or their 30s would agree or understand. But, just remember, it’s not a permanent home.”

For some younger Jewish voters, the issue is mostly Corbyn himself.

“Literally if it were anyone but him, (we) would be Labour,” said Tanya Ohana, 24, who works in retail in Golders Green. She said she would have been happy to vote for an earlier style of Labour leader — a Tony Blair or a Gordon Brown — but was voting Conservative in protest of Corbyn. “He is extremely anti-semitic,” she said.

“Even if Jeremy Corbyn leaves tomorrow or Friday, this could be generations before there’s confidence and trust between U.K. Jews and the Labour party,” said Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community’s main representative body.

“The once great anti-racist party has vanished.”

Under Corbyn’s leadership, the vast majority of Jewish voters have already left the Labour party, although a small number have said they still will vote Labour. So have a number of the party’s Jewish parliamentarians, most notably Luciana Berger, a rising star among the Liberal Democrats who decried Labour as “institutionally anti-semitic” when she resigned from it in February. Tensions escalated to such an extent last month that Britain’s apolitical chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, issued a rare injunction against Corbyn, attacking the “poison” of anti-semitism in the Labour party.

Corbyn denies these charges, and sought to reassure voters after Mirvis’s statement. “Anti-semitism in any form is vile and wrong,” Corbyn said. “It is an evil within our society. There is no place for it — and under a Labour government, it will not be tolerated in any form whatsoever.”

But his messaging has rarely been clear. After Mirvis’s statement, Corbyn was pressed by the wellknown BBC host Andrew Neil on whether it was “anti-semitic to say Rothschild’s Zionists run Israel and world governments.” Neil had to pose the question three times before Corbyn conceded that it was.

For many British Jews, the issue is not Corbyn’s words, but the atmosphere they feel those words have fostered, both within the party and beyond. For some, the issue has led to a painful questioning of a society with a long history of establishment anti-semitism but that has long been seen as a tolerant home for Jews, especially those fleeing persecution in continental Europe.

“The anxiety is really high, and it’s genuine. This really is how the Jews feel. This is not a smear,” said van der Zyl. “It’s heartbreaking to see all this here. We hope for a good outcome, but there’s no good outcome. There’s no winners, whatever the result of the general election.”

Deutsch, the retiree in Golders Green, said there has always been anti-semitism in Britain, particularly among the old-guard aristocracy, but “you wouldn’t say it in public.”

“That’s changed,” he said. “The British community is a tiny, tiny minority, and actually we never realized this before. We never realized how tiny and vulnerable we were,” said Montefiore. “Corbyn and his faction have made you realize that.”