Grotesque vitriol that makes me despair for my own party

When I was born in egypt at the end of World War II, the daughter of a German-Jewish father and Austrian- Jewish mother, Jews were still being exterminated in hitler’s gas chambers.

I grew up thinking that we would never forget them.

Yet over 70 years later, the Labour Party is not only infected by the cancer of anti-Semitism but is signally failing to address it.

Yesterday, my colleague Chris Williamson, the MP for Derby north, issued a half-hearted apology after footage emerged in which he suggests that the Labour Party has been ‘too apologetic’ over accusations of anti-Semitism.

Williamson’s own apology was an exercise in duplicitous fudging: ‘There have been very few cases of antiSemitism in the Labour Party,’ was a sentence he slipped into his statement, no doubt in an attempt to save face.

he clearly hoped his words would help him avoid disciplinary action. But they have failed to do so.

I wrote to the Chief Whip and to Jeremy Corbyn to insist that an immediate suspension takes place, which has now thankfully happened.

A zero-tolerance approach to antiSemitism means there can be no space for Chris Williamson’s hateful rhetoric. This man has a history of supporting anti- Semitic activists and denying anti-Semitism. Tough action is the only way to stop him.

The battle to destroy the cancer of anti-Semitism in British society has always been important to me, and I congratulate the Mail for campaigning vigorously against it.

I owe it not least to my maternal grandmother, who was shot dead by the nazis at the gates of a Lithuanian concentration camp. In a poignant last letter to her son, my uncle, she twice used the phrase ‘please do not forget me completely’.

On my father’s side of the family, I had an uncle who was killed in Auschwitz. Fourteen years ago, I managed to bring myself to visit that awful reminder of the atrocities of the holocaust and, in a pile of suitcases housed within a display case, I saw one bearing his initials, Rh.

I have no idea whether it belonged to him, Richard haas — so very many people were killed there. But I will never forget my feeling of complete helplessness during that utterly chilling moment.

nor will I forget the reason that, after the end of the war, my family eventually left egypt: a stone was thrown through a window at my father’s small factory in what was clearly an act of antiSemitism. he was determined to get us out ‘ before there is a second holocaust’ and Britain was the first country to accept us.

Like him, I will be eternally grateful to the UK, which acts as a beacon of tolerance across the world. But I have never quite lost that feeling of being an outsider.

That was partly the reason why I joined Labour 56 years ago; the party which fought racism, that stood for equality and which promoted international solidarity.

Of course, there has always been anti-Semitism on the hard Left, just as there is on the extreme Right. But in those days, it was on the fringes.

now, thanks to Corbyn’s supporters’ apparent inability to distinguish between being Jewish and being an ardent supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin netanyahu, it is in the mainstream.

I, for example, have always believed in the importance of having a nation state for the Jewish people. But that hasn’t stopped me being a persistent critic of successive Israeli governments, over their treatment of Palestinians.

In the Labour Party I joined, Chris Williamson’s anti-Semitic vitriol would have been eradicated immediately. But, so far, Jeremy has turned a blind eye to it.

Williamson is one of Jeremy’s closest political allies and one of the most vocal supporters of his leadership.

In the past, Williamson has described the insistence that Labour has a problem with anti- Jewish racism as ‘a dirty lowdown trick’ which was being used for ‘political ends’.

his latest comments — which earned him his suspension — came just hours after he booked a house of Commons room to screen a film sympathetic to Jackie Walker, an activist suspended from the party after she said that Jews had controlled the slave trade.

When I confronted Jeremy about anti-Semitism in the corridors of the houses of Parliament and told him to his face what I and many others were feeling — that he is making it very difficult for Jewish people to stay in the Labour Party — it was me who faced disciplinary action.

Fortunately, that was quickly dismissed, even though Labour’s lawyers — including Lord Charlie Falconer, former Lord Chancellor under Tony Blair — did their utmost to intimidate me and force me to apologise. I will never be silenced on this issue.

Last week, three of my closest colleagues — Joan Ryan, Ann Coffey and Luciana Berger — chose to leave the Party and, although that is a decision which I mourn and respect, I have no intention of following them.

I have always believed that the best way to bring about change within an institution is from within and that’s why I am calling on Jeremy to show, once and for all, that anti-Semitism will no longer be tolerated in the party I love.

he needs to realise that we are at a turning point.

The protracted delay in deciding to suspend Chris Williamson will demonstrate yet again that Jeremy simply doesn’t understand the importance of combating anti-Semitism.

A zero-tolerance approach to antiSemitism is the first essential step in ensuring that we erase this stain.

Only then can Labour become the defender of those who have been subjected to inhumane treatment for no other reason than their race, their ethnicity and religion — rather than the party that leaves me, as a Jew, despairing more than ever before.

Tough action is the only way to stop this Jeremy must realise we are at a turning point