Corbyn and the ‘Minister for Jews’
JEREMY CORBYN’S election as Labour leader has come amid divisions in his camp, with senior aides arguing over the apparent intention to appoint a “Minister for Jews”.
A series of leaks from those close to Mr Corbyn revealed a plan intended to pacify the Jewish community following concerns about his links to antisemites and Holocaust deniers.
The idea was discussed last week within his team as an attempt to repair the fractured relationship, although no such appointment has been made.
The JC first revealed the plan on its website at the weekend after a leak from a senior Corbyn source.
Then on Monday, after a separate leak, the Sun reported that “Jeremy Corbyn is to appoint a special Minister for Jews” and quoted a “source close to Mr Corbyn” as saying “Jeremy is not antisemitic in any way but he knows his former associations have been problematic”.
Today, the JC can reveal that the idea was also floated by a senior Corbyn adviser to Martin Bright, this paper’s former political editor. Mr Bright responded that it “sounded like something from Nazi Germany”.
On each occasion, the sources referred specifically to a “Minister for Jews”, although it is thought this may have been shorthand for a wider role that reached beyond the Jewish community but that was intended to appeal specifically to the Jewish community.
It is unclear whether the plan was discussed in sufficient detail to have identified how the role would fit in to Mr Corbyn’s front-bench team or who would fill it, although the position could have come under the brief of new Shadow Communities Secretary Jon Trickett or Shadow Equalities Minister Kate Green, and would have included efforts to work with all religious minorities. When speaking to the JC, the source admitted that the community had a poor perception of Mr Corbyn and suggested that the new post would be a signal that he intended to have a friendly approach to British Jews. Prior to Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet appointments on Sunday, the JC under-stands that a number
of Jewish MPs indicated that they would decline if asked to serve.
Ivan Lewis offered to remain in his role as Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary due to the ongoing crisis at Stormont but was sacked.
During the leadership campaign, he had criticised some of Mr Corbyn’s supporters who had engaged in antisemitic rhetoric.
Luciana Berger agreed to be Shadow Mental Health Minister and is now the only Jewish member of the shadow cabinet. She issued a statement on Wednesday explaining her appointment had come following a “full and frank discussion” with the new leader.
“Reaching this decision was not easy,” Ms Berger said. “I cannot honestly say I agree with everything the new leader has said over the years. I felt he was willing to listen and engage.”
As a former Labour Friends of Israel director, Ms Berger is also one of the few remaining supporters of the country in the shadow cabinet — along with Tom Watson, the new deputy leader.
BY THE time Jeremy Corbyn tweeted a Rosh Hashanah greeting wishing the community a “sweet and Happy New Year” on Sunday afternoon, Jewish Labour supporters had already spent more than 24 hours attempting to come to terms with his election as leader of the opposition.
Senior Jewish figures in the party and across the community greeted his win with a mixture of shock, dismay and, in some cases, quiet acceptance.
While there were reports of some Jewish supporters rescinding their party memberships in the hours after Mr Corbyn’s election, communal organisations adopted a wait-and-see policy.
On Sunday night, Ivan Lewis, the most senior Jewish shadow cabinet minister, was one of the first to be sacked. A former minister, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary had attacked Mr Corbyn’s views during the leadership election as a “cause for serious concern” and said he had shown “very poor judgment”.
Following the result on Saturday, Mr Lewis wrote on Facebook that he would never leave the party — and highlighted that he had “never accused Jeremy Corbyn of antisemitism”.
The Guardian reported that when Mr Lewis then spoke to Mr Corbyn on Sunday afternoon, he had offered to remain in his Northern Ireland role during the current crisis. He had also raised with the new leader his own experiences of antisemitic abuse during the leadership campaign.
Mr Corbyn was said to have agreed that the men should meet to discuss the issue. But five minutes later Mr Lewis received a text message from the leader saying he had been sacked.
A spokesman for Mr Lewis said no date had been fixed for the meeting to discuss antisemitism.
After Luciana Berger’s appointment to Mr Corbyn’s team, reports emerged of major disagreements between the party’s Jewish MPs over whether to serve under the new leader.
The shadow cabinet has been stripped of almost all the Israel supporters it previously included. The departure of defeated leadership candidate Yvette Cooper, who had served as Shadow Home Secretary for almost five years, also deprives the party of a key figure who had worked with Jewish groups such as the Community Security Trust on issues including security and antisemitism.
She was replaced be fellow leadership loser Andy Burnham, who has previous experience of working with the community but whose links are tenuous.
Diane Abbott, a leading critic of Israel, was handed the Shadow International Development brief, which covers issues including aid for Palestinians. Hilary Benn continues as Shadow Foreign Secretary, a position he took up after the general election in May.
The new Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, wrote to Home Secretary Theresa May during last summer’s Gaza conflict to ask whether British people fighting in the IDF would be stripped of their citizenship and potentially pursued on terrorism charges, similar to those facing Britons who join Daesh in Iraq and Syria.
One senior Labour Israel supporter said efforts had been made for years to “cultivate” the party’s new deputy leader, Tom Watson. It is now hoped that he could be a “go-to” figure and the potential counter-balance to Mr Corbyn and others on the front bench.
Another supporter would be Michael Dugher, a Labour Friends of Israel officer who was installed as Shadow Culture Secretary. Israel supporters including Liz Kendall, Rachel Reeves and Tristram Hunt will not be returning to work under Mr Corbyn.
One senior pro-Israel Labour supporter said the situation was “bloody depressing” but added that “a lot of good people” remained clear about “sensible positions” Labour should take on Israel. “We are up for the fight,” the source added.
Communal anxiety around Mr Corbyn’s election is pronounced. Last month, seven in 10 British Jews told a
JC poll they were concerned about the prospect of him as leader, with more than 80 per cent worried about his potential foreign policy positions and links to Holocaust deniers.
Communal leaders reacted to Mr Corbyn’s election with caution. Board of Deputies president Jonathan Arkush said he had asked for an early meeting with Mr Corbyn to discuss key issues.
“We would like Mr Corbyn to affirm and implement a ‘zero tolerance’ stance towards racists, extremists, Holocaust deniers and homophobes,” said Mr Arkush. Simon Johnson, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, also looked forward to meeting the Labour leader at the earliest opportunity.
The key fear, said one adviser, was that the new leader would take a previously fringe issue – Israel – and make it
mainstream.
FOR SOME — Jews and non-Jews, on the left and outside it — the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership is regarded as a disaster. Even had he not managed to win, the extraordinary outpouring of support for him that we have witnessed would have been seen as at least deeply disturbing.
Among the many criticisms aimed at Corbyn during his leadership campaign, the most divisive and emotive one is that he is someone who consorts with and provides political cover to antisemites, fundamentalists, homophobes and anti-democrats. For these reasons, Jews, and Jewish Labour supporters in particular, are among those who are most horrified by Corbyn’s resounding win.
Of course, inevitably, given the bracing diversity of Jewish life, Jews have also been prominent among Corbyn’s supporters and have been vocal in their denials that he is in any way a supporter of antisemitism. Nonetheless, given the cautiously liberal and openly Zionist tendencies that studies have shown prevails in British Jewry, it is fair to assume that Corbyn’s Jewish supporters are a minority — albeit a highly significant one, and perhaps larger than many think — within British Jewry.
The anger and bewilderment that many British Jews feel towards the Corbyn ascendency is matched by a similar outrage by Corbyn’s supporters, Jewish or not, that someone they consider a dedicated anti-racist should have been ‘‘smeared’’ in this way.
This leaves the mainstream Jewish community with a problem. For the first time in decades, a major British political party is being led by someone whose relationship with the British Jewish community is confined to one minority section of that community. Even if you think, as many do, that a Corbynled Labour party will be an electoral disaster, Labour will remain the second largest party for at least the next five years and will constitute a vital part of the political process.
It is not an encouraging prospect for the mainstream Jewish commu- nity to be cut off from a major part of the British political landscape.
So there is little choice but to ‘‘reboot’’ the Jewish community’s relationship with Jeremy Corbyn and the fragile party that he now leads. But how? There appears to be so much bad blood that reconciliation seems impossible.
The road ahead is certainly difficult, but there are a number of reasons why the situation is not as hopeless as it appears. First, the Labour party’s tradition of Jewish involvement is so long, deep and diverse, that, if Corbyn wishes to truly be an inclusive leader and attract those who supported his fellow leadership candidates Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, he will have no choice but to listen to the concerns of Labour Jews.
Labour needs to be a broad church, and it will be all but impossible to ‘‘purge’’ anti-Corbynite tendencies, at least in the short term, and if they themselves stay the course. After all, Corbyn himself survived decades of marginalisation within Labour and even New Labour had to throw the party’s left wing the occasional bone.
Second, Corbyn’s evident horror at being ‘‘smeared’’ as tolerant of antisemitism can, given imagination and willingness on all sides, be the starting point for dialogue. The difference between Corbyn and his detractors is not over the unacceptability of antisemitism, but over what constitutes antisemitism.
Without minimising the breadth of this divide, it may not be as unbridgeable as some think. Corbyn’s history of dodgy contacts emerged during a time when he was marginal and largely ignored. Perhaps — and, yes, it is a big ‘‘perhaps’’ — with his actions and his contacts under unprecedented scrutiny, there might be the impetus for him to at least research his ‘‘friends’’ more assiduously.
Third, Corbyn has defended his choice of contacts as part of a strategy of openness and dialogue. He appears to be entirely sincere about this, despite his interlocutors being overwhelmingly clustered to one side of the political spectrum, at least in the case of Israel and the Middle East.
So why not try and nudge him towards pushing the envelope in selecting dialogue partners? As a marginal activist MP, nothing was pushing him into a genuinely broad and open engagement with a wide range of voices. As leader of the second largest British political party, who knows? At the very least, by taking Corbyn at his word, it may be possible to find out whether he is as committed to dialogue and conflictresolution as he claims.
This, then, is the challenge for both Corbyn and for the Jewish community: can we open up a dialogue that may narrow the divide? Can he be encouraged to sit down with Zionists? With centrist and right-wing Israelis? With British Jews who have spent the past few months condemning him?
Let’s hope so.